I consider myself a pretty adventurous audience member. I love being convinced of the improbable, and I’m willing to go to some pretty odd places in pursuit of that certain je ne sais quoi that comes from taking a plunge into strange, dark waters. I’m especially fond of the dreamy, unsettling strain of European horror that M seems to be channeling—Roman Polanski’s The Tenant is one of my favorite films—so, on paper at least, James Wilkinson’s world-premiere M: Refractions from an Evil Act seemed right up my alley.

But even the strangest journeys require some sort of destination. I love a good sinister, dreamlike mindfuck as much as anyone, but there has to be some method to the madness. A work cannot simply disappear into the recesses of its creator’s imagination and expect the audience to follow. At the end of the day, a play, like a film, still has to be worth the trip. On both counts, M fails, resulting in an overlong and taxing journey into the insufferable and the incomprehensible.

I suspect the confusion is intentional. The incomprehensibility, however, seems more likely to be the product of incompetence. Perhaps the idea is to plunge the audience into a world in which we understand nothing except the feelings the play hopes to evoke: confusion, isolation, paranoia, guilt. (Though I can usually manage all that perfectly well without leaving the house.) But to what end? Without some kind of payoff, the whole thing becomes the theatrical equivalent of banging one’s head against the wall.

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The story, such as it is, centers on an American woman named M, who returns to her Paris hotel room after a hazy night of partying convinced that someone has been inside and that the hotel’s proprietors—a creepy brother-and-sister duo named Jolene and, simply, The Clerk—know more than they’re letting on. Add the mysterious man Lone (Tim Hoover), who appears, disappears, and reappears throughout the evening, and that’s more or less the whole thing, at least so far as I could tell.

It would perhaps be easier to lose oneself in the play if its star, Julia Hertzberg, were better equipped to carry so slippery and psychologically demanding a role. But I found it difficult even to keep my head in the dialogue because she never succeeds in bringing into focus precisely what it is M is experiencing. Strife? Mania? A psychotic break? A bad trip? Whatever it is, Hertzberg never manages to make it feel like anything other than acting. Her voice drips with sarcasm and pestilent disdain throughout, and she comes across less as a woman unraveling than as a brat.

But there is some good work being done on this stage, chiefly by Peter Tone as the hotel’s co-owner and clerk. He is utterly believable throughout, which is more difficult than it might sound given the material. Tone strikes exactly the right balance between ordinary-seeming and menacing. Sydney Grant similarly keeps her head above water in spite of the impossible material she has to work with. Even when I had no idea what anyone was talking about—which was about 80 percent of the time—I enjoyed watching the two of them work.

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Director Joe Juknievich deserves some credit for creating an unsettling atmosphere without any bells and whistles. But the repeated use of a plastic water bottle as a debilitating weapon capable of sending people sprawling to the floor is…certainly a choice.

Would the play be easier to endure at eighty minutes than at more than two hours? Possibly. Would a different leading performance help? Undoubtedly. Would a script less committed to obscurity for obscurity’s sake improve matters? One would hope. But for most of its running time, M: Refractions from an Evil Act proves less interested in examining an evil act than in inflicting one.

M: REFRACTIONS FROM AN EVL ACT. Through August 9 at Exiled Theatre at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. www.exiledtheatre.com. Running time: 2 hours.

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In the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, lovers become rivals, laborers become tragedians, and men become beasts. This summer, delight becomes exasperation with almost equal frequency. Directed by founding Artistic Director Steven Maler in honor of thirty summers on the Common, this free-to-all Midsummer boasts an enormously talented, top-shelf cast that often generates such sparks that it is impossible not to feel euphoric. Just as often, however, this production advances triumphantly in one direction while stumbling backward in another.

But when it’s good, this Midsummer accounts for some of the most fun I’ve had at the theater all year. Shakespeare’s troupe of laborers turned amateur actors, the Mechanicals, are brought to life with a Pixar-like level of specificity and personality. Take Karen MacDonald, for example, whose Petra Quince herds her band of thespians toward their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe with the intensity of a Serious Artiste unveiling a long-awaited masterpiece, making her all the funnier for being so gloriously outsized. As three of her pathetic players, John Kuntz, Michael Broadhurst, and Alex Leondedis do more with a handful of lines than I’ve seen some actors do with entire soliloquies. And has any production not been made at least a little better by the inclusion of Brooks Reeves?

The crown jewel of this production, however, is Shakespeare’s quartet of mismatched lovers—Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius—whose jealousies, humiliations, and romantic entanglements are played with such profoundly satisfying chemistry that their scenes become something close to a master class in comedy. Rendered with exquisite vim and vigor by Meghan Carey (also wonderful in The Huntington’s The Hills of California earlier this year), Annika Burley, Jaime José Hernández, and Jack Greenberg, they elevate the proceedings so completely that whenever they leave the stage, the production loses much of its momentum and, all too often, its spirit.

Eight years ago, not long after graduating from high school, Hernández made his professional debut as one of the fairies in Apollinaire Theatre Company’s outdoor Midsummer in Chelsea, a production of the play that no company in Boston has yet surpassed. Seeing him return to the very same play all these years later, now as one of its leading men on one of the city’s biggest stages, is deeply satisfying.

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And then there’s Paul Melendy as Bottom, the gloriously egotistical leader of the Mechanicals who finds himself transformed into an ass by Puck (a tireless, mischievous Nick Cearley), whose performance finally solves the age-old question of what it would have been like had Clark Gable played Ace Ventura. Melendy, Boston’s greatest comic actor, is predictably hilarious, particularly during the second-act performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. (If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone peel off his own skin and punt his head into the audience, boy, have I got a play for you.) But the performance would be twice as effective at half the size. Sometimes, too much of a good thing can be, well, too much.

Less successful are De’Lon Grant and Nora Eschenheimer, who play both the rulers of Athens and the rulers of the fairy kingdom. The performances are unusually rote, particularly given the lively, richly individualized work happening all around them. Eschenheimer eventually comes slightly to life after Titania falls under Puck’s spell, but neither performance achieves the vivid specificity found elsewhere in the cast. As kings and queens of these two worlds, they ought to command the stage. Instead, they are too often upstaged by their own subjects.

The world of the fairies is apparently meant to unfold at a music festival, an inspired conceit that is only fitfully realized. Beyond loosely establishing a particular visual vocabulary, the production does very little with the idea (nor would anyone know it’s supposed to be a music festival if they hadn’t read the program). Amy Rubin’s appealing, heart-shaped scaffolding set creates endless opportunities for Maler’s playful staging (and it is beautifully lit by Maximo Grano De Oro), but the production never commits to the premise. Why there is a ball pit at a music festival remains unclear. Equally mysterious is why the giant disco ball—which actually does belong at a music festival—is never used.

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But the biggest buzzkill of all is the astonishingly bad music shoehorned into both acts. While the lyrics are, presumably, Shakespeare’s, David Reiffel’s atonal, tuneless compositions somehow manage to make everyone singing them sound off-key, a problem that also did poor Jared Troilo no favors in last summer’s As You Like It. The songs amount to little more than generic video-game muzak overlaid with aimless “melodies.” For heaven’s sake, this is supposed to be a music festival. Literally anything else would have done.

John Lam’s “choreography” only compounds the problem. Awkwardly executed by a cast that often appears as uncomfortable performing it as we are watching it, the movement looks, at best, like a cruise ship revue and, at worst, an elementary-school talent show. Matters are not helped by the five-member fairy ensemble, which is simply too small to give the numbers the oomph they need, nor by Rachel Padula-Shufelt and Brooke Stanton’s unfortunate DIY Rainbow Brite costumes. The result is a trifecta of bad music, bad choreography, and a thinly imagined fairy world that not even the lovers and the Mechanicals can overcome.

Some shadows have offended; some enchantments never landed. Yet lovers true and players fine did much to make the evening shine. But tuneless song and lumbering dance gave disappointment every chance. Yes, Shakespeare on the Common’s a treasure; till next midsummer, then, with greater pleasure.

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. Through August 9 at Commonwealth Shakespeare Company on Boston Common. www.commshakes.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

Boston has never had much trouble memorializing the accomplishments of famous white men. In recent years, the city has become more attentive to its Black history as well. Yet even within that story, the women who stood at the center of Beacon Hill’s Black political life remain comparatively overlooked.

By the end of the nineteenth century, these women had helped transform the neighborhood into one of the country’s most politically active Black communities. Abolitionists, educators, journalists, and activists lived and worked within just a few blocks of one another. From her home on Charles Street, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin published The Woman’s Era, one of the nation’s first newspapers written by and for Black women, and helped organize the gathering that would eventually give rise to the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.

This lesser-known chapter of Boston life lies at the heart of Company One Theatre’s world-premiere production of A New Era, written by Miranda Austen ADEkoje and directed by Summer L. Williams. Blending historical drama, documentary theatre, music, and a dash of contemporary resonance, the expansive new work follows seven formidable women as they gather in Boston in the summer of 1895 to debate the future of Black political power in America.

Ambitious almost to a fault, it is clear that A New Era is the product of enormous research and sincere conviction. But the script too often mistakes historical significance for dramatic significance while leaving the audience to supply crucial context on its own.

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ADEkoje assumes an awful lot of knowledge from her audience, not only about Ruffin herself, but about Booker T. Washington, Margaret Murray Washington, Victoria Earle Matthews, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and the philosophical fault lines separating them.

Without that context, A New Era can be difficult to fully grasp. The audience may understand that something important is happening without ever fully understanding what, exactly, these women are trying to build—and to what end. As a consequence, disputes over things like leadership and strategy register as personal disagreements rather than the struggle to define a national movement. The stakes are never made explicit enough for the audience to understand just how much any of this matters.

The organization these women hoped to create would eventually become the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, one of the most influential organizations in Black American history. Its members established schools and settlement houses, campaigned against lynching and segregation, fought for women’s suffrage, and laid the groundwork for generations of civil rights activism. What was being debated in Boston in 1895 would reverberate for decades. If only the play communicated those stakes.

Throughout the production, ADEkoje and Williams repeatedly draw connections between the world of 1895 and our own through a meta-theatrical framing device and the use of contemporary music. Some of these moments are genuinely affecting, yet the play never fully follows through on them.

If A New Era occasionally loses its way, it is only because its ambitions are so large. Director Summer L. Williams wisely embraces the same expansive spirit. Her production moves fluidly between intimate conversation and public spectacle, even spilling out into the theater itself. The scope is impressive, though the play never quite finds a way to marshal all of its ideas.

Williams has assembled a remarkable ensemble, each actor carving out a distinct place within a crowded field of personalities and competing convictions. Patrice Jean-Baptiste is especially fine as Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, while Regine Vital, Frances Domond, Sydney Alicia Jackson, and MaConnia Chesser prove equally indispensable. Only Aislinn Brophy seems somewhat out of step with the others, delivering every line with an unrelenting severity that clashes with the production around them.

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The play saves its largest conflict for Josephine’s loss of control over the movement she helped create. But after building toward that rupture, it never makes clear what her stepping aside means—for Josephine, for Margaret Murray Washington, or for the organization now taking shape without her at its center. The conflict carries the weight of a climax without the clarity or resolution of one.

The larger picture remains hazy, too. After spending an entire evening watching these women build an organization from the ground up, we leave with only the vaguest sense of what it became, what it accomplished, or what legacy it ultimately left behind. It’s a curious place to stop.

A New Era may not entirely succeed, but it fails in fascinating ways. The women themselves come vividly to life. The movement they built—and what we are meant to make of it—remains more elusive.

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A NEW ERA. Through August 8 at Company One Theatre at The Strand, Dorchester. https://companyone.org. Running time: 2 hours.

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It seems only right that Moulin Rouge! should take its final tour bow in Boston.

Eight years ago, the show christened the newly restored Emerson Colonial Theatre in its pre-Broadway world premiere, as so many musicals had done before it. Nobody could have known then that it would become an international hit, survive a pandemic, spend years crossing North America, and eventually return to the city that introduced it to the world to say its final goodbye. Now, one month before the Broadway production will also say au revoir, these beautiful bohemians have come home, going out with the same bang they arrived with.

The show’s detractors have always had an easy target. Moulin Rouge! is silly, overstuffed, sentimental, and wears its heart proudly on its sleeve. But subtlety was never the point. Beneath all the spectacle is an almost embarrassingly earnest conviction that art matters, that beauty matters, and that love—romantic and artistic alike—is one of the few things that make life worth living.

But it’s more than that, too. Having opened on Broadway just months before the pandemic brought the industry to a standstill, Moulin Rouge! has spent nearly its entire Broadway and touring life accompanying the theater world’s long and uneven recovery. In that sense, the show has become an emblem of the art form itself, standing as a shining example of Broadway’s resilience in the years following COVID—not because it changed the art form, but because it reminded audiences why they had missed it so dearly. Now, after four years and more than seventy-five cities, the national tour comes to a close just a few blocks from where it all began.

When the tour first played Boston in 2024, it was so wobbly, and its principal cast so shruggable, that I wrote the show off. I didn’t just feel that it had aged poorly; I wondered whether I had been wrong about the five-star review I wrote for DigBoston (RIP) when the show first premiered. I was not alone in that opinion. This final company of Moulin Rouge!, however, is so damn good that it made me reconsider all my previous misgivings.

Central to this about-face is Gabriela Carrillo as Satine, who makes it difficult to remember anyone else in the role. She’s the best of all possible worlds: effortlessly funny, completely sexy, and so believable that the musical’s more improbable propositions, of which there are many, all seem breathtakingly real. And her chemistry with Christian—a deeply beautiful-in-every-way Luke Monday—is so spellbinding that you can’t help but get swept up in this frothy, intoxicating world.

On Sunday night, this compulsively enjoyable, 10-time Tony-winning musical will shower a Boston audience with confetti for the final time. Thanks to this tremendous company, it remains as easy to recommend as ever.

MOULIN ROUGE! Through August 2 at Citizens Bank Opera House, Boston. www.broadwayinboston.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

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Skip It: ‘Betrayal’ at Gloucester Stage

Inspired in part by Harold Pinter’s own affair, Betrayal has long been regarded as an actors’ dream. It’s no wonder it has attracted an impressive parade of stars since its debut nearly 50 years ago, from Michael Gambon, Bill Nighy, Blythe Danner, and Raul Julia to Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber, Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and, most recently, Helen Hunt. It’s easy to understand the appeal: Emma, Jerry, and Robert are among the richest roles in the modern repertoire, demanding extraordinary chemistry and an ability to communicate enormous emotional lives through small gestures and subtext. That’s where the famous Pinter pauses come in.

A successful production must make that invisible life palpable. As Betrayal moves backward through time, the actors have to become younger, lighter, and more hopeful, even as the audience knows exactly where they’re headed. More than that, the affair cannot feel tawdry or merely illicit. It has to feel inevitable—powerful enough to justify the destruction it leaves behind: two ruined marriages and the end of a meaningful, long-term friendship. Otherwise, the play becomes exactly what it appears to be on the page: three well-dressed people discussing lunches, books, and vacations over drinks.

Which is pretty much what Shana Gozansky’s production for Gloucester Stage is like. Instead of watching three people with years of shared history, we’re watching three actors read Harold Pinter’s lines. There’s so little life between them that many scenes resemble table reads, and the three gifted actors—Liza Giangrande, Michael Underhill, and Tanner Efinger–don’t have an iota of chemistry. The accents sound costumey, and Giangrande in particular comes off as too young. More directors would be wise to remember that 30 looked very different in 1978 than it does today, and Betrayal often benefits from actors who bring a little more gravitas and lived-in experience to the stage. Rachel Weisz was 43 when she played Emma, and Helen Hunt 63. So whether or not Giangrande is technically an appropriate age is of secondary concern. She is, however, consistently luminous, and while it’s always a pleasure to see Underhill, a surer directorial hand would have refined his performance. Of the three, Efinger comes closest to nailing the show’s requirements.

Regardless, the dismal nature of Gozansky’s production should be unsurprising to anyone who endured her other recent works, namely the unwatchable Wipeout and the desecratory Little Women, neither of which suggested she might be able to handle something like Betrayal. Her staging is anemic, and that it all unfolds on such a shockingly ugly set (by Jeffrey Petersen) is further representative of her lack of taste—another hallmark of her last three productions. When the best part of Betrayal is the scene changes (thanks to Amanda E. Fallon’s lighting and Julian Crocamo’s sound), there’s a big problem.

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Skip It: ‘‘As You Like It’

Up in Rockport, this year’s outdoor Shakespeare production at Lane’s Coven is As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s sunniest comedies, where banished dukes, disguised lovers, and confused romantics all find their way into the Forest of Arden in search of a happy ending.

Last summer’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was an unexpected delight, where Justin Genna’s astute yet modern, playful staging boasted an able, riotous cast. Lane’s Coven’s other recent offerings, the gender-swapped Topdog/Underdog and the kooky Church—proved strangely exciting in their own ways, casting the company in a unique and entirely favorable light in my mind.

But unfortunately, this As You Like It pales in comparison to those productions, and it made me long for Genna’s sure finesse. In his program note, director M. Graham Smith notes that the world of Shakespeare’s play is eerily familiar, finding a group of young people fleeing Duke Frederick’s court as it descends into a violent authoritarian crisis. For obvious reasons, this should be a slam dunk.

But Smith’s production renders what I would call one of Shakespeare’s most consistently amusing plays not only generally incomprehensible, but morbidly uninteresting. To be sure, there are a few delights: the ever-wonderful Debra Wise, of course, but also Lily Narbonne and Alex Strzemilowski as the hesitantly-in-love Phoebe and Silvius. Both find something genuinely playful and amusing here, with specific characterizations that make the latter half of the play tolerable. Thomas Vice is similarly strong throughout, and in many ways, along with Wise, serves as a steadying force that holds this wobbly whole together. Michael López Sáenz also has some respectable moments as Jacques.

Unfortunately, there are more detriments than plusses: David Keohane and Eryn O’Sullivan are both rather dull as the leading lovers Orlando and Rosalind, and what hope does the rest of the show have if watching bugs fly through the night air is more entertaining than watching them? As Celia, Naomi McLeod has no discernable character and resorts to shouting her lines as if we were seated a football field away. Worst of all is the sledgehammer clowning of Breezy Leigh, who gave a similarly relentless performance last season in Gloucester Stage’s Ms. Holmes and Ms. Ward - Apt. 2B. She gave me a headache then and she gave me a headache now, operating the entire time at a 20 out of 10—an exhausting, far too broad exercise in comedic waterboarding.

Ah, well. Maybe next year, as Sondheim once said.

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See It: ‘Buyer & Cellar’ at Hub Theatre Company

Although I think slightly less of Jonathan Tolins’s 2013 gay little play than I did when I first saw it a decade ago, it remains a delightful escape from not only the horrors of the real world, but the horrors of what has been a brutal summer season of theater.

Buyer & Cellar imagines what might happen if someone were actually hired to work in the private shopping mall Barbra Streisand famously built beneath her Malibu home—a lavish, meticulously detailed fantasy complete with cobblestone streets, boutiques, a candy shop, and displays of costumes and collectibles. Inspired by the real basement Streisand revealed in her 2010 book My Passion for Design—my go-to housewarming gift for friends of a certain... you know, refinement—the play follows an out-of-work actor (Victor Shopov) who takes the bizarre job of working in her artificial mall, expecting little more than a paycheck, only to find himself gradually drawn into her fabulous orbit.

Daniel Bourque’s staging makes good use of the Club Café space, and the always-a-pleasure-to-see Shopov has an alluring magnetism that makes watching this play a joy. I didn’t care for all of the characterizations, however: an Igor-like housekeeper was more Transylvania than Malibu, and the play is stronger without even a hint of a Streisand impression (besides, the accent here is more Long Island than it is Brooklyn). And even if the play’s more tender explorations of stardom and the emotional weight of the special relationships gay men have with their chosen divas are eschewed here in favor of broader comedy, Hub’s Buyer & Cellar is still a sweet treat worth indulging in.

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Skip It: ‘Bad Books’ at Gloucester Stage

In this next installment of reductive liberal boomer catnip, and right on the heels of The Huntington’s Eureka Day, comes yet another inane play that touches on a slew of provocative social issues yet says absolutely nothing of substance: Sharyn Rothstein’s Bad Books.

Making its regional premiere at Gloucester Stage Company courtesy of the National New Play Network, Bad Books belongs to a familiar species of contemporary regional theater drama: the well-intentioned social-issues play that mistakes topicality for depth. Here, a librarian and a mother find themselves on opposite sides of a dispute over a young adult novel. What begins as a debate about censorship soon becomes a play about social media mobs, addiction, depression, suicide, guilt, redemption, corporate politics, and just about every political issue under the sun. None of it coheres.

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Director Bevin O’Gara, whose productions of Tribes, Small Mouth Sounds, and Appropriate for SpeakEasy Stage rank among the strongest work I’ve seen in Boston, is unable to make much of the material. In fact, she makes it worse. Broad caricatures, exaggerated physical comedy, and a series of bafflingly cutesy scene transitions push the production into schlocky territory. In three roles as the Librarian, Manager, and Editor, Therese Plaehn plays each with a sketch comedy broadness that seems imported from another play entirely.

The larger problems belong to Rothstein’s script. The playwright bends over backwards to make The Mother a complicated figure: a former author, recovering addict, cancer survivor, divorced working parent, and woman haunted by her mistakes. Aimee Doherty is generally fine as she tries to locate the humanity beneath all that baggage—and something reasonable within the absurdly written character—but in reality, there’s no making lemonade out of this lemon.

We are asked to believe that a woman obsessed with monitoring her son’s reading habits, worried enough to search his room, and hypervigilant about outside influences somehow remains completely blindsided by the emotional crisis consuming him. Of course, it’s not impossible. Parents miss things every day. Dramatically, though, it doesn’t work. The play’s tragedy depends upon The Mother being both extraordinarily attentive and inexplicably oblivious.

The ending is even more ridiculous. Rothstein spends much of the play showing us the damage caused by The Mother’s certainty, only to reverse course at the eleventh hour. Suddenly, the woman who helped create the crisis is positioned as part of the cure. She creates a problem, installs herself as the person who can solve it, pats herself on the back for coming up with a reasonable solution, and even memorializes her son in the library’s new stained-glass window she shattered in the first place. It is downright Trumpian.

I could go on, but I won’t. The bottom line is that Bad Books is a prime example of all that is wrong with so many new plays—and so many of the theater companies that continue to produce them.

See It: ‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ at Central Square Theater

When Charles Ludlam wrote The Mystery of Irma Vep in 1984 for his scrappy downtown New York theater company, he could hardly have known the play would become one of the most produced comedies in America. A mashup of Victorian melodrama, gothic horror, penny dreadfuls, and old movie monsters, Irma Vep delights in vampires, werewolves, mummies, and haunted estates. Yet the context surrounding the play remains essential to engaging with it today—as David R. Gammons understands so brilliantly in this production.

At the time, AIDS was still a terrifying and only partially understood phenomenon, though New York’s gay community was watching young men succumb to bizarre cancers, mysterious infections, and rapid physical deterioration with increasingly alarming frequency. Ludlam wasn’t writing an AIDS play, but it’s impossible to separate Irma Vep from the moment that produced it. The play transforms horror into camp spectacle, and while the story is frequently convoluted, nonsensical, and occasionally annoying, its obsession with mortality, corruption, and the persistence of the dead elevates it into something like a vital artifact from a community in crisis. Imagine seeing this play in 1984, as an epidemic that would soon devastate an entire generation of artists was only beginning to unfold. Its comedy becomes inextricably underlined by the gravity of loss, and those are the souls Gammons and company honor so beautifully here. To simply view Irma Vep as fun or silly is to miss the point entirely.

His production embraces every ounce of the play’s camp absurdity, complete with cock-and-ball light fixtures, boob lamps, and enough sexual innuendo to power a small city, while never losing sight of the grief lurking underneath. How nice it is to encounter a director in Boston with this kind of vision and flair. He’s crafted a production that is simultaneously ridiculous and deeply felt, reverent and irreverent, hilarious yet ultimately devastating.

As is always the case with Gammons’s productions, the design work is uniformly marvelous. His scenic design, Seth Bodie’s costumes, Jeff Adelberg’s lighting, and Nate Tucker’s ingenious sound design fit together with remarkable precision—something so few productions here manage to accomplish.

At the center is Paul Melendy, delivering what may well be the finest comedic performance he’s given in recent memory—and that’s a high bar to clear. He deploys his comic gifts here with astonishing precision, and his ability to wring every possible laugh from a moment remains an absolute art. He is finely matched by co-star Gabriel Graetz, who demonstrated some of that chemistry with Melendy last season in Featherbaby. Here, he proves himself every bit Melendy’s equal, matching his comic precision while bringing real emotional weight to the production’s unexpectedly moving final moments.

Not everything works: the set occasionally turns the louder passages into an echo chamber, rendering portions of the dialogue inaudible, and Irma Vep would probably be stronger as a shorter one-act as the plot increasingly collapses under the weight of its own nonsense. But then again, the plot isn’t really the point. The point arrives in the play’s final moments.

After two hours of sexual farce, decay, and theatrical mayhem, Ludlam suddenly reveals the wound beneath the joke. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” the play reminds us. “We are all God’s creatures, every one of us.” Finally, it leaves us looking skyward, wondering whether we might still catch glimpses of those we’ve lost “toward the stars and toward the great silence.”

As Melendy and Graetz stand before us, undressed and tear-soaked, the camp falls away and the monsters disappear, revealing a perfect, devastating coda. Few final images have lingered in my mind quite the way this one has, and I suspect it will stay there for a very long time.

AIDS would claim Ludlam’s life just three years after the play premiered. Whether one views Irma Vep as a response to that crisis or merely a work shaped by the world in which it was created, Gammons finds something profoundly moving at its center: a community refusing to surrender its humor, its humanity, or its capacity for joy in the face of unimaginable loss.

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Skip It: ‘Annie’ at Greater Boston Stage Company

As if Greater Boston Stage Company’s programming couldn’t get any worse, they’ve now given us our third Annie in 18 months. The human body is simply not made to withstand three Annies in such a short period of time, especially when the third (and hopefully final) Annie is as horrendous as this one.

Director Tyler Rosati’s productions always seem to operate according to the same insufferable philosophy: more is more and louder is better. Who can forget the punishing Titanish, the exhausting, overdone The Play That Goes Wrong, or the incomprehensible Murder for Two?

Nonsensical choices run amok in his latest example of directorial malpractice, blurring the line even further between professional theater and community theater—a line Greater Boston Stage Company has been inching toward for the better part of a decade. In a production filled with things to be mad about, inattention to detail ranks chief among them. Why are some Hooverville residents wearing full faces of makeup, complete with clownish blush? Why are they wearing dance shoes and modern flats? These are homeless people living during the Great Depression. Why are ensemble members making awkward eye contact with the audience? Why is every performance pitched at exactly the same cartoonish level? The entire production steamrolls the audience with noise and nonsense, everything so broad that it becomes not merely ineffective, but insulting. Rosati has rendered the entire musical in 72-point Comic Sans.

The talented cast is repeatedly waylaid by his direction and a series of embarrassing artistic decisions. Annie simply doesn’t work with an adult ensemble this small. In one instance, an actor playing a policeman (RIP the dog catcher, apparently) reappears as a Hooverville resident seconds later, then turns up as a butler at Warbucks’ mansion almost immediately after that. The effect is comically close to low-budget community theater.

Judging from the production photos, one would assume the worst thing about this Annie might be Katy Monthei’s horrifically ugly set. But the production is so misguided that the set doesn’t even crack the top ten.

To her credit, Helen M. Brady has a powerful voice, and her Annie is shaded in colors and tones that could be amusing under better circumstances, but it’s a shame she’s so misdirected—and permitted to scream nearly everything. Similarly, Ceit Zweil has glimmers of promise, but she plays Miss Hannigan like a cartoon buffoon. (Her choreography is strong throughout, though it too frequently borders on excess.) As Rooster, Mark Linehan is so grotesquely loud that at one point I had to physically plug my ears.

Thank God, then, for De’Lon Grant, who cools the proceedings considerably and brings some desperately needed gravitas and professionalism to the stage. Tader Shipley is likewise faultless as Grace Farrell, and while the casting of Kathy St. George as Lily St. Regis remains one of the stranger things I’ve encountered on a Boston stage, it is always nice to see her.

Then there’s the sound.

Adam Smith—along with every other adult who allowed the deafening volume to persist—owes the audience an apology. The orchestra level is only 12 rows deep, yet everything is calibrated as though the production were trying to reach the 300 level at TD Garden. Nearly every song ends so deafeningly that I expected the stage lights to shatter and rain glass down on the poor cast. I left so shellshocked and irate that I actually kept an eye on the clock. It took two hours for my ear sensitivity to subside and four hours for my headache to disappear. None of this is hyperbole.

It might surprise you that I am not, in any way, a bona fide Annie hater. In fact, I think the show’s delights are many. Its score is unimpeachably strong, the jokes are genuinely funny, and it’s one of the few musicals that can legitimately entertain both children and adults. Its construction is truly flawless. Sure, Annie can be corny, but it cannot be played as corny. Everything in the musical must be treated with complete sincerity, and its characters must be played as real people. That’s what makes it work, and that is something Rosati seems incapable of understanding.

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See It: ArtsEmerson and Front Porch Arts Collective’s ‘In Old Age’

The first few installments of Mfoniso Udofia’s Ufot Family Cycle set an awfully high bar. We were spoiled by The Huntington’s productions of Sojourners and The Grove, even by the thrilling reading of runboyrun. But after the wobbly Her Portmanteau, the unfulfilling, unwieldy Kufre n’ Quay and The Ceremony, and the totally bewildering reading of Lifted, I began to wonder if the cycle had lost its footing.

But leave it to ArtsEmerson and Front Porch Arts Collective to give Abasiama her groove back.

Set decades after we first met the Ufot family matriarch, In Old Age finds Abasiama living alone in the Worcester home that has become the backdrop to so much of the family’s history. When her daughter, Toyoima, hires handyman Azell Abernathy to tackle some long-overdue repairs, the two form an unlikely friendship that slowly blossoms into something deeper, sweeter, and unexpectedly healing.

As Abasiama, Ebony Marshall-Oliver is exquisite. Having watched this character endure years of sacrifice and disappointment across the cycle, it’s immensely satisfying to see her finally confronted with a question life has rarely afforded her: What do you want? Her facial expressions are priceless as suspicion gradually gives way to curiosity, affection, and finally joy. Watching Abasiama slowly become her fullest, most unburdened self is one of the production’s greatest pleasures.

Marvin Bell is terrific as Azell, full of warmth, patience, and gentle humor that makes their growing connection feel completely natural. Every small breakthrough in their relationship feels earned, thanks to the pair’s sublime chemistry.

Director Dawn M. Simmons’s staging is beautiful, allowing the play’s intimacy to breathe without forcing sentiment. Eduardo Ramirez’s gorgeous lighting, Arshan Gailus’s immaculate sound design, and Jeffrey Peterson’s set complete one of the season’s most thoughtfully realized productions.

Having spent the better part of this cycle watching Abasiama survive everyone else’s story, it’s deeply gratifying to finally watch her become the author of her own. Whatever the final chapter has in store, In Old Age gives one of the cycle’s most enduring characters the gift she has spent a lifetime earning: the chance to imagine a future that still belongs to her.

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See It: Sullivan Rep’s Merrily We Roll Along

After splendid productions of A Little Night Music and Company, Sullivan Rep keeps its Sondheim streak alive with a thoughtful, beautifully rendered Merrily We Roll Along.

Merrily famously tells its story in reverse, beginning with three friends at the end of the road before tracing the choices that brought them there. Director Dan Sullivan proves an ideal guide through the complicated material, delivering a production that is both thoughtfully conceived and beautifully staged, not to mention superbly sung.

Katie Clark gives the standout performance as Gussie, while Sean Donnelly is an ideal Franklin Shepard, pairing matinee-idol charm with complete ease behind the piano—easier said than done in a Sondheim musical. Dan Sullivan is, unsurprisingly, perfectly cast as Charley Kringas, and Carly Evans rounds out the trio with genuine warmth and vulnerability as Mary. Together, the three share the easy chemistry—and eventual corrosion—the musical depends on.

In addition to acting, choreographing, and directing, Sullivan designed the costumes, demonstrating a real eye for color and period throughout. It has also become increasingly clear that Sullivan Rep’s ensembles are operating on a level many others in Boston simply aren’t. Even actors without lines have built fully realized characters, making the stage feel alive no matter where you look. And once again, Jenny Tsai proves she’s one of the finer musical directors in Boston. Last year’s Elliot Norton-winning work on A Little Night Music would have been difficult to top, yet her command of Sondheim’s fiendishly difficult score here may be even more impressive.

I must say, however, that Sullivan Rep’s decision to make the Mother Brook Arts & Community Center its home continues to impose unnecessary limitations on its own work. The space is acoustically challenging, devoid of theatrical character or atmosphere, and was, at least over the weekend, oppressively hot. Most frustratingly, the sound remains a persistent problem, making entire scenes and lyrics difficult to make out (I still don’t know what Can-Can is about). Sullivan Rep’s artistry and ambition often outmatch their space, but I suppose that’s a better problem to have than the opposite.

For all its technical frustrations, Sullivan Rep ultimately accomplishes the hardest thing Merrily asks of a production. By the time Franklin, Mary, and Charley arrive at the beginning of their story looking up at the New York stars, we aren’t just watching three young artists anymore, but we’re mourning the people they’ll become with a heartbreaking inevitability. I’d call that a success.

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For a play about people who can’t stop talking, Eureka Day sure has awfully little to say.

Written in 2018 and propelled to greater prominence in the years following COVID, Jonathan Spector’s satire arrives at The Huntington at a distinct disadvantage: we’ve already had this conversation. Repeatedly. On social media, in think pieces, on television, on podcasts, and around dinner tables.

Set in an aggressively progressive Berkeley private school, Eureka Day follows a group of well-intentioned parent board members whose commitment to inclusion, empathy, and process is tested by a mumps outbreak and a brewing vaccination controversy. What begins as a comedy of manners quickly becomes a portrait of institutional paralysis, as adults who pride themselves on open-mindedness prove incapable of confronting disagreement or reality.

At the center are Suzanne, the committee’s unofficial leader and chief defender of vaccine “choice”; Don, a professional mediator incapable of choosing sides; Eli, a well-meaning entrepreneur eager to prove his enlightenment; Meiko, a holistic-minded skeptic; and Carina, a woman of color whose increasingly practical objections are met with a steady stream of well-intentioned condescension.

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The play’s biggest laughs come during a livestreamed community meeting, where comments in the chat begin piling atop one another, showcasing the irrationality and escalating hostility familiar to anyone who has spent more than thirty seconds online. For this brief stretch, Spector stops simply pointing at social absurdities and begins dramatizing a little of the machinery that produces them.

Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. Once the comments stop flying, Eureka Day settles back into familiar territory: performative progressivism is exhausting, and affluent liberals can be self-important. We know.

The problem is not that Spector’s targets are inaccurate, but that they are obvious; nearly every joke hangs so low it risks scraping the floor. These observations were already familiar when the play premiered in 2018. But after years of think pieces, social media discourse, prestige television, and countless other works mining the same terrain, they feel almost archaeological. Eureka Day behaves as though it is revealing a hidden species when in fact it is exhibiting one that has already been exhaustively catalogued. The horse is not merely dead by the final scene. It has been beaten, buried, exhumed, beaten again, and then discussed into oblivion.

Perhaps this helps explain the play’s popularity. Eureka Day offers a particularly comforting form of self-critique. It allows educated, affluent liberal audiences to laugh at people who look suspiciously like themselves while never forcing them to question anything more fundamental than their own occasional excesses. The laughter almost becomes a form of self-congratulation, and audiences are invited to recognize their own hypocrisies without ever confronting anything deeper. For all its confidence, the play arrives at remarkably few conclusions beyond the observation that certain kinds of people can be insufferable.

If Eureka Day’s central flaw is that it mistakes recognition for insight, this production’s flaw is that it largely mistakes satire for farce, and director Margot Bordelon rarely trusts the material to find its own laughs. Nearly every joke is underlined, and too many performances seem determined to show the audience where the joke is, flattening characters into caricatures. Satire requires absolute conviction. Characters must remain certain of their own intelligence, compassion, and moral authority; the comedy lies in the gap between those self-perceptions and reality.

Only Ken Cheeseman’s Don and Japhet Balaban’s Eli consistently resist that impulse, and both actors understand that satire requires commitment rather than commentary. Much of the cast operates at a broader pitch; Nancy Lemenager is the most conspicuous offender, frequently pushing Suzanne’s contradictions too hard and mugging through comic beats like a wine-drunk Kathie Lee Gifford on the third hour of Today. She comes off less like a person than an editorial cartoon, pushing the production even further past the point of no return.

Two major design choices further undermine the play. Suzanne is arguably its most important figure—a wellness-minded Berkeley liberal whose language of empathy, inclusion, and personal choice gradually reveals itself as a vehicle for anti-vaccine dogma. If the audience doesn’t immediately recognize that type, much of Spector’s satire collapses. Yet Zoë Sundra’s costuming choices push Suzanne in the wrong direction. Clad in crisp oxfords, tailored light-colored trousers, loafers, and a meticulously polished blonde coif, she reads less as a Northern California life coach than a country-club moderate summering in Palm Beach. The politics of that picture matter, especially in 2026.

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Luciana Stecconi’s set presents an even greater problem. Whatever Eureka Day’s faults, the script is quite specific about the world it inhabits: an elite Berkeley K-8 private school populated by affluent, highly educated parents who have devoted enormous time, money, and energy to curating every aspect of their children’s environment, down to banning single-use paper plates. Instead, the production strands them in a brightly colored avalanche of books, stuffed animals, murals, and educational detritus that resembles a daycare center in the final stages of a nervous breakdown. Whatever else this room may be, it is not the school Spector has written.

One can hardly fault The Huntington for programming Eureka Day. The play’s blend of contemporary relevance, recognizable targets, and pre-approved outrage is practically subscription bait. Yet watching it in 2026 feels less like encountering a sharp new satire than sitting through one of Eureka Day’s own board meetings: a great deal of discussion, very little illumination.

Eureka Day. Through June 28 at The Huntington, Boston. www.huntingtontheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

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The merits and shortcomings of On Your Feet! are, at this point, largely settled. More than a decade removed from its Broadway premiere, the Gloria and Emilio Estefan biomusical occupies a comfortable middle tier of the genre: richer and more dramatically grounded than disposable exercises like Summer: The Donna Summer Musical and Motown: The Musical, but nowhere near the artistic heights reached by Jersey Boys, Beautiful, or even MJ.

Bio-musicals can often feel like a waterboarding of greatest hits, and On Your Feet! largely avoids that trap. There is rich dramatic material here, not only in the way Gloria Estefan was plucked from obscurity in Miami’s Cuban exile community, but in the family dynamics surrounding her rise. There are stories within stories: Gloria’s relationship with her mother and grandmother, the shadow cast by a father who fought for his adopted country, and Emilio’s own immigration to America as a young child.

I’ve long considered it a pleasant but fundamentally limited piece of entertainment, a competent jukebox musical buoyed by a beloved songbook and the enduring magnetism of its subjects. Which is precisely why Marcos Santana’s production for North Shore Music Theatre comes as such a surprise.

Santana, whose sublime production of Rent last season demonstrated the director-choreographer’s gift for storytelling, striking stage pictures, and an uncommonly sharp theatrical instinct, has not rewritten On Your Feet! so much as revealed what had been there all along. This production is so well-calibrated, so infectiously alive, that it made me revisit a show I had long dismissed as bland and somewhat soulless. If not a complete rehabilitation, it is certainly a compelling argument for reconsideration.

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Santana, who was in the original Broadway company and served as Sergio Trujillo’s associate choreographer, has adapted that Tony-nominated choreography in inventive ways for North Shore’s in-the-round configuration. More impressively, it is executed with astonishing verve by an incredible ensemble.

Leading the company is Isabel Leoni, a recent Boston Conservatory at Berklee graduate making her professional debut as Gloria Estefan in a remarkably assured performance. Leoni charts Gloria’s evolution across decades with impressive emotional specificity while capturing enough of the singer’s distinctive vocal qualities—including that occasional upper-register rasp—to evoke the real artist without descending into impersonation. From certain angles, she even bears a striking resemblance to Estefan herself. It’s the sort of debut that immediately puts a performer on one’s radar.

As Emilio, Marcello Audino understands that his role’s most important quality is not ambition but certainty. He never forces the character’s drive into villainy or vanity, locating instead the genuine devotion beneath it. One of the musical’s unexpected strengths is its depiction of a healthy, enduring show-business marriage, and Audino anchors that relationship beautifully. He moves easily between supportive husband, tireless advocate, and shrewd businessman, while his chemistry with Leoni provides the production with its most consistent pulse.

And how great to see Karmine Alers again, one of Rent’s very finest Mimis Broadway has ever seen, excellent here as Gloria’s fiercely protective mother, a former performer whose own dreams were interrupted by exile and circumstance. Sylvia Cedeño-Genat is a delightful scene-stealer as the family matriarch Consuelo, and together they help create a family dynamic so natural that one never doubts these people belong to one another.

Santana and company are wise not to overcrowd the stage with scenery, trusting instead in Jack Mehler’s vivid, atmospheric lighting to conjure the world around it. Few productions this season have been so adept at establishing mood, time, and place with such economy. Just as crucially, Alex Berg’s sound remains clear and robust throughout, while Jose Delgado’s musical direction provides the ideal foundation for the evening’s considerable musical pleasures. It’s a delight to see Emilio Sosa’s Broadway costume designs preserved here as well.

Yet for all of Santana’s accomplishments, there remains one problem no production can entirely solve.

The very talky first act and the ballad-heavy second still glaze over Gloria’s meteoric ascent in a way that inadvertently kneecaps her stardom. One minute she is an up-and-coming singer finally finding an audience, and in what feels like the next scene she is a star. The show repeatedly assumes we can fill in the blanks.

The second act places extraordinary dramatic weight on a bus accident, the outcome of which is never truly in doubt. That the musical ends with Gloria’s post-accident appearance at the 1991 American Music Awards remains an odd and ultimately unsatisfying dramatic choice. Most of her biggest and most beloved songs are immured to the curtain-call megamix, and the accident itself never generates quite the level of suspense or drama the writers seem to intend. We know Gloria survives. We know she returns to the stage. We know she is still thriving decades later.

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More significantly, On Your Feet! ends as though the Estefans’ greatest achievement was surviving tragedy. In reality, survival was merely the prelude to their most enduring influence, and the show never quite articulates how large the Estefans became in American culture. They were not simply successful recording artists. They were architects of a cultural shift. Long before Ricky Martin’s bon bon, Jennifer Lopez’s booty, and Shakira’s hips, the Estefans proved that Latin music could cross over into the American mainstream without surrendering its identity. They helped create the blueprint for an entire generation of artists who followed, yet Emilio’s emergence as one of the most influential producers in Latin music is barely acknowledged. It also would have been nice to be reminded that the pair would eventually receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their contributions to American culture. Of course, a musical cannot be expected to dramatize every milestone in a forty-year career. Yet a few lines of narration, a projected epilogue, even a brief acknowledgment of what followed would have gone a long way toward closing that gap.

Instead, On Your Feet! treats the Estefans’ comeback as the destination rather than the turning point. The result is a curious diminishment of its subjects, and we leave admiring their resilience without fully understanding their significance.

That North Shore’s production succeeds as thoroughly as it does is a testament not necessarily to the material, but to Santana’s ability to illuminate it. On Your Feet! remains the same musical it was ten years ago, with all the strengths and weaknesses that entails. Santana does not reinvent the show so much as look at it from exactly the right angle, allowing it to catch the light. And boy, does it shimmer.

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On Your Feet! The Story of Emilio & Gloria Estefan. Through June 14 at North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly. www.nsmt.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

“Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” the old theatrical adage goes. Watching Hairspray at The Umbrella Arts Center, it feels less like a witticism than a warning.

How is it possible for one of musical comedy’s most reliable crowd-pleasers to end up generating almost no laughs at all? Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s deliriously tuneful score and Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell’s expertly engineered book have carried Hairspray triumphantly through more than two decades. Yet here, Najee A. Brown’s staging is both theatrically clumsy and surprisingly amateurish, filled with awkward blocking, muddled stage pictures, frantic choreography, and performances that too often seem outmatched by the demands of the show.

Jokes are missed repeatedly, lines tossed away with little apparent thought or care. Scenes that should land effortlessly collapse into chaos instead, with actors pushing in entirely different directions from one another. Some mug shamelessly outward; others barely seem to establish characters at all. Few appear to belong in the same theatrical universe, let alone the same production. The cumulative effect is disastrous, but it’s also bewildering: a musical comedy staged with remarkably little feel for how this kind of show actually works.

Yet Hairspray can still feel miraculous in the right hands. I caught an early Broadway preview in 2002 and remember the Neil Simon Theatre practically levitating that night. The show moved with such comic momentum and infectious joy that we left in a kind of dazed euphoria, as though we had briefly inhaled better oxygen. Here, the musical feels leaden and long.

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That failure stems partly from Brown’s apparent misunderstanding of camp. One does not act campy. Rather, you commit fully to a world already pitched slightly beyond reality, and the humor comes from characters who take themselves and their circumstances completely seriously. Too many performances here seem to be winking at the material instead of believing in it. Hairspray only works when everyone onstage occupies the same heightened reality — one where teenage dance shows carry life-or-death stakes and Tracy Turnblad’s optimism feels powerful enough to reorganize Baltimore itself. Brown never establishes that world.

The cast is largely on its own here, which is unfortunate because there is real talent scattered throughout the production. Robert Saoud could likely make a fine Edna under stronger direction, and Maggie Cavanaugh nicely captures Penny Pingleton’s skittish sincerity. Chip Phillips brings a lovable warmth to Wilbur, while Joshua Lapierre has the polish and confidence for Corny Collins, even if the distinction between Corny’s television persona and his off-camera self never fully registers. There are flashes of strong work elsewhere too, particularly from ensemble members Simone Alyse, Nikita DaRosa, Darren Paul, and MacKenzie LeTorré, who is the production’s best dancer.

Others seem less comfortably matched with their roles. Nick Corsi lacks the heartthrob swagger Link Larkin requires, while Christian David sings and dances capably enough as Seaweed but appears noticeably less comfortable once the music stops. Meryl Galaid, meanwhile, squanders a handful of scene-stealing comic roles.

Aimee Doherty and Lisa Kate Joyce, meanwhile, have more than enough command to make Velma and Amber Von Tussle land properly. Instead, Brown encourages them toward relentless mugging and overemphasis. At one point, the pair comes shrieking down a staircase at such sustained and unnatural volume that I’m fairly certain my left eardrum sustained permanent damage. Barbara Pierre’s Motormouth Maybelle fares somewhat better, though sections of her songs are delivered so faintly that you can barely hear her.

Tracy Turnblad herself remains the evening’s largest missing ingredient. Tracy is not merely the heroine of Hairspray; she is the force that drives it. She should move through Baltimore as though ordinary life were already bursting into song around her. Nora Sullivan never quite locates that buoyant center, though Brown’s direction hardly helps matters. Tracy should radiate the kind of irrepressible momentum that pulls the entire world of the musical into orbit around her. Here, the role feels oddly muted, and the show never fully recovers from the absence of that animating spark.

Brown’s choreography compounds the evening’s larger problems by piling movement onto the show without much regard for whether it suits the material or the performers tasked with executing it. Nearly every number is overloaded with choreography, much of it sloppy, awkward, or arbitrary. At times, the dancing is so messy that if you told me parts of it were being freestyled in real time, I’d believe you.

“You Can’t Stop the Beat” proves especially disastrous. Brown averages roughly one choreographic gesture per syllable while the orchestra barrels through the number as if there’s a curfew. The cast can barely keep pace. By the finale, everyone looks winded and slightly panicked.

Elsewhere, numbers suffer from similarly misguided instincts. “It Takes Two,” one of the score’s sweetest and simplest expressions of teenage infatuation, is so overchoreographed that the song never has room to breathe. “Timeless to Me,” which should stop the show through sheer comic ease and affection, keeps drowning beneath unnecessary choreography, including a random two-person kickline that perfectly captures Brown’s inability to distinguish exuberance from overkill. Even “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now” becomes so cluttered with extraneous dancing that the number’s charm — the song’s mother-daughter interplay — gets almost entirely swallowed up. “Stop! Don’t! No! Please!” indeed.

The visual design presents its own problems. Hairspray may be heightened and cartoonish, but it still needs a recognizable world underneath the exaggeration. Here, however, nearly the entire musical unfolds against a shimmering silver curtain (why?) and a bulky white unit set by Cameron McEachern, featuring a staircase, television monitors, and vinyl-record floors that give the stage the unfortunate air of a cruise ship revue. Because the floor always remains the set of “The Corny Collins Show” regardless of location, scenes bleed together. Tracy’s house, detention, the Hefty Hideaway, Motormouth’s record shop, a jail that looks nothing like a jail — everything occupies the same abstract environment, giving the musical the vague geography of a shopping mall food court.

The wigs (by Emerald City Theatricals and Cara Guappone) do the production no favors either, which is a particular liability in a musical literally called Hairspray. The hair looks cheap and aggressively costumey, more Party City than early-’60s Baltimore. Alex Berg’s sound design is rough throughout. Dialogue is muffled, microphones cut in late, and singers are routinely bulldozed by the orchestra. Entire lines become impossible to make out. Even large group numbers sound tentative, the cast often seeming unsure exactly when to come in vocally (the musical direction is by Jordan Oczkowski). These are the kinds of amateur mistakes that should not still be happening on a professional stage.

Musical comedy is an unforgiving form. It demands precision, commitment, and the illusion of ease. Above all, it requires everyone onstage to believe in the same bright, ridiculous world so completely that the audience has no choice but to follow. At The Umbrella Arts Center, that world never fully materializes. What remains is not Hairspray in all its delirious joy, but a clumsy approximation of it — a musical so busy manufacturing joy that the strain eventually becomes the show.

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Hairspray. Through May 17 at The Umbrella Stage Company, Concord. www.theumbrellaarts.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

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The past is always present at 1839 Wylie Avenue, the storied Pittsburgh home of Aunt Ester, and the seedbed for August Wilson’s entire Century Cycle. The house is a living archive of the Black presence in America, sacred ground where the visible world burdened by things like law, work, and money meets ancestors, history, and the dead—a site of reckoning and the gravitational center of Wilson’s world. It sits at the heart of Gem of the Ocean, the first installment of his ten-part Century Cycle, now staged by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Hibernian Hall through May 17.

Not just a chronicle of the 20^th century but a dramatic record of Black life in America decade by decade, Gem of the Ocean is the Cycle’s origin point. At its center is the character that Wilson himself called “the most significant persona of the cycle,” the 285-year-old Aunt Ester, a figure who exists somewhat outside ordinary time.

Born around the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, Ester is a force, embodying the unbroken line of Black existence in America. She’s a moral and spiritual authority and memory keeper, serving as connector between the African past and the African-American present. 1839 Wylie is the house where that memory is both held and transmitted.

Set in 1904 (but written in 2003), Gem of the Ocean unfolds at a moment when freedom is newly granted but far from realized. Slavery may not be legally present, but structurally and psychologically, its effects are, leaving Black life suspended in a state of freedom perilously close to its opposite. Into this unresolved world comes Citizen Barlow (Joshua Lee Robinson), a young man seeking relief from the guilt surrounding a man’s death. He arrives at Aunt Ester’s door asking for his soul to be cleansed—he’s heard that she does that sort of thing—and is ultimately made to face the full weight of what he has done and the world in which he has done it. The play becomes not just about one man’s guilt, but about how an entire people live with what has been done to them, and what they’ve had to do to survive.

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The play gathers a set of figures who each answer the same question differently: how to live in a world where freedom exists but cannot be fully exercised. There’s Caesar (a brilliant Kadahj Bennett), the local constable, a figure of Black authority bent toward enforcing white order. His answer is simple: follow the rules, even when they do harm. Solly Two Kings (Jonathan Kitt), a former Underground Railroad conductor, stands as his moral counterweight, still living by resistance, even when it costs him everything. And then there’s Citizen, newly arrived and unformed, a young man trying to decide what kind of person he will be. Filling out the play are Black Mary (Marhadoo Effeh), Aunt Ester’s protégé, caught between these forces and not yet settled into her own, and Eli (Dereks Thomas), the house’s gatekeeper, who maintains its order and discipline. Then there’s Rutherford Selig (Michael Broadhurst), a white traveling peddler descended from a line of “people finders” who tracked enslaved men and women, now making a living off the very people his family once hunted. The play doesn’t pass judgment on any of them. It lets their choices speak for themselves.

Of all of Wilson’s plays, Gem of the Ocean may be the most demanding. It’s less immediately legible, more resistant to momentum, and unusually dependent on how it is staged. It is no small task to translate Wilson’s plainspoken but incantatory language into something that remains engaging (it is also no small task to stage an eleven o’clock metaphysical journey to a city at the bottom of the Atlantic, but more on that later). And so it is with a very heavy heart when I say that Actors’ Shakespeare Project and director Monica White Ndounou have given us a production that fails to supply the conditions the play needs to come alive.

It isn’t that there’s one big issue that sinks this production, but rather a series of misjudgments that all add up to one disappointing whole. I’ve already mentioned Wilson’s prose, and the dialogue here—as in all of his plays—needs to crackle and sing, carrying scenes forward with a momentum the plot is not designed to supply. It should feel fast, familiar to the people speaking it, and even something the audience has to lean in to catch. Here, much of the dialogue, which can already run long, just feels rehearsed and delivered, stiff and overdetermined, without a shared rhythm across the cast. A major exception is Kadahj Bennett, who, as Caesar, shows an uncanny understanding of how Wilson’s dialogue should sound.

Then, there’s the matter of the set (designed by Peyton Tavares), which resembles a theatrical playing space rather than a lived-in structure, reading as props placed rather than belongings kept. 1839 Wylie should feel like things have accumulated there, and nothing in the set suggests time layered on top of time, the past pressing in on the present. Worse, the tidy, flat-built frame house and stock staircase give the set the look of a school production, not a storied house with a past. Isaak Olson’s often too-bright lighting doesn’t help matters.

Another fatal issue is that Regine Vital, who plays Aunt Ester, reads as several decades too young for the role. When Ester reads young, it is much harder to imagine that this woman carries an inherited authority, and the play itself contracts. At the very least, she needs to look as though she’s outlived everyone else on stage. A fully realized Ester could probably counter a set that’s too tidy and arranged, but if she doesn’t carry gravity, nothing does—the house becomes just a house, and the production has little room to succeed.

And now let’s get to that metaphysical journey I mentioned earlier. When Citizen comes to Aunt Ester asking to have his soul washed after a man’s death, he’s looking for relief, for the guilt to be taken from him. What she ultimately offers instead is a reckoning, sending him on a ritual journey to the City of Bones—a city at the bottom of the Atlantic, formed from the dead of the Middle Passage: Africans who died in the holds of slave ships or were thrown overboard en route to enslavement. There, he’s made to realize that he isn’t just one man who made one mistake, but that he’s standing inside a long history of suffering and survival. What Ester wants him to understand is that he cannot understand himself without confronting the history that made him. It isn’t just about redemption, but whether he can live with dignity inside a system designed to deny it.

The journey to the City of Bones cannot feel like a theatrical device imposed on the play from left field, which is how it reads here. A successful production of Gem of the Ocean cannot feel like people talking in a living room punctuated by a spiritual sequence—Blithe Spirit, this is not. An audience must feel that the house contains more than just this present moment; it holds the ages. The spirituality must be ever-present. Without that, the City of Bones doesn’t feel inevitable—it feels arbitrary. That sense of inevitability also depends on Aunt Ester as a figure who carries time itself, and here she simply doesn’t. The youth of this Aunt Ester makes the ritual harder to accept as real within the world of the play, draining it of its force. There is no real understanding of any of this in the production.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are two great performances here: the aforementioned Kadahj Bennett, who fills out Caesar with real force, making clear the logic—and the cost—of his position, and the very impressive Joshua Lee Robinson, who ably fills in all the shades of Citizen, from raw fear to a deep and earned clarity in a truly beautiful way. Regine Vital also has some beautiful moments, but the tides are against her here.

Wilson uses 1839 Wylie to bookend the Century Cycle, opening the series inside the storied house and closing with Radio Golf, where the house faces possible destruction through redevelopment. Though the home and its address are fictional—the number 1839 gesturing back to the Amistad rebellion—it isn’t just a location, but a site anchored to a historical moment of resistance, a kind of ground zero for everything Wilson is tracing.

But 1839 Wylie is a real place—or rather, an empty lot in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. It holds cultural and historical weight, even serving as the site of outdoor productions of Gem of the Ocean. There’s no preserved structure, no museum or house you can visit, but the parcel of land remains a kind of living marker, its significance sustained not by what stands there, but by the history it has come to represent.

The same is true of Wilson’s plays, which remain significant regardless of the production around them. This one falters often. And yet, to hear the language is still its own kind of reward, even here. That this production is given life at Hibernian Hall, in Roxbury, a historic center of Black life in Boston, only deepens that experience. This production may not fully come together, but to sit in that world, in that place, still has the power to transform.

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Gem of the Ocean. Through May 17 at Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Hibernian Hall. www.actorsshakespeareproject.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

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One thing more Boston companies would be wise to accept: if you don’t have the means to do a show, you probably shouldn’t do it. If you can’t bring down a chandelier, don’t do The Phantom of the Opera. If you don’t have the dancers, don’t touch West Side Story. And if you can’t convincingly put a ship on stage—or destroy one, or cast the men who sail it—don’t do Swept Away.

Drawn from the music of The Avett Brothers and loosely inspired by the notorious Mignonette shipwreck, Swept Away is not a modest show. It asks for a ship you can believe in, a storm that can take it down, and a world that presses in on the men left behind. It trades in hunger, exposure, and brutality. It is also, as critics have noted since its premiere at Berkeley Rep four years ago, not a very good musical—a conclusion only reinforced by its brief and troubled Broadway run.

The story focuses on four men: a devout Big Brother (a very good Bishop Levesque), his restless Little Brother (Max Connor), a hardened and morally unmoored Mate (Peter DiMaggio), and a Captain (Christopher Chew) nearing the end of his career. After a violent storm destroys the vessel, the four are left adrift in a lifeboat with no food, water, and little hope of rescue. The show moves between the ordeal and a later accounting, where the surviving Mate is forced to tell the story he’s spent a lifetime avoiding.

But here, in Jeremy Johnson’s dreadful production for SpeakEasy Stage, we don’t have a great cast or a dazzling set to distract from the mediocre material. It isn’t that the cast isn’t good, but that most are miscast. These are supposed to be 19^th-century whalers, men who’ve spent years doing hard, physical work at sea—the very picture of brawn and masculinity. Instead, most look absurdly young and fresh-faced, reading less like seasoned sailors than boys performing a conservatory showcase.

The casting is only the first of several baffling decisions. For Swept Away to work, the world has to feel physically and morally hostile—exposed and uneasy, with a constant sense of threat. Instead, this production offers no such pressure, no real atmosphere holding it together. For starters, it’s never believable that they’re on a ship. The ever-present, brightly lit scrim is just plain ugly, flattening the stage into a washed-out backdrop that gives the show an unmistakably amateur look. Seth Bodie’s costumes gesture toward period, but everything looks arranged rather than worn, like modern clothes dirtied up. The footwear allowed onstage is a particular affront—modern rubber grips and dance shoes that have no business being here. Karen Perlow’s lighting thankfully provides some atmosphere, but Janie E. Howland’s set barely amounts to more than a suggestion, with two small masts and a scatter of ropes. And where is the world around it? The sounds of the sea? The mist, the fog, the moon? Why is no one ever wet? Nothing adds up. And—again—for a professional theater charging healthy admission prices, this is hard to excuse. How is an audience supposed to get lost in a show so inattentive to its own details?

And so what is one to do when you need to stage a shipwreck but can’t? Jeremy Johnson’s solution is to thread an aerialist (Ezra Quinlan) through the evening, hanging, climbing, dropping in and out of scenes, and, at times, standing on deck with the others, looking out of place. It’s inelegant, and it undercuts the realism the piece depends on. The execution is clunky and anticlimactic, which only makes the problem worse. This has to feel like a real boat on a real ocean. Turn it into a circus act, and you lose the plot.

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The show’s central image, at least in the second half, should be brutally simple: four men confined to a lifeboat, with nowhere to go and no way out. But Johnson never gives that confinement any real physical shape. There’s no lifeboat, no defined space, nothing that actually holds these men in place. They just stand—not even with a wobble—and move about the front of the stage as if being trapped at sea were beside the point. If the play’s moral pressure depends on men being trapped together in a tiny vessel on an endless ocean, then the production has to make us feel that.

There are some plusses. It’s good to see Peter DiMaggio stretch into a different kind of role here—and he’s a formidable leading man—though he veers into overacting in the second half, and the Southern accent remains puzzling given that the Mate is described as a Yankee from Vermont—both problems point back to the direction. Christopher Chew is, as ever, excellent and well-cast. The score is well-sung, and the band, led by Paul S. Katz, is the evening’s most consistently professional element. Ilyse Robbins’s choreography is also a bright spot—though when isn’t it?

If SpeakEasy were committed to doing this piece, it might have been wiser to present it as a stripped-down concert in the Roberts. Instead, we’re left with something that has become all too common at SpeakEasy: inattention to detail and a disregard for the material’s basic demands. It’s too bad.

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Swept Away. Through May 23 at SpeakEasy Stage, Boston. speakeasystage.com. Running time: 90 minutes.

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When Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code opened on Broadway in 1988, AIDS was the dominating fact of gay life in New York. Tens of thousands of Americans were already dead, and the city was the epicenter. In the press, and in the broader culture, gay men were still being defined largely through illness, fear, and death.

The theater was responding directly. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William M. Hoffman’s As Is, both of which opened in New York in 1985, confronted the crisis head-on and remain touchstones for having done so (Angels in America wouldn’t come for another six years).

Already a London success, Breaking the Code was radical in a different register. It did not engage the crisis unfolding around it. Instead, it placed a gay man at the center of history not as victim or warning, but as genius—a figure of brilliance and consequence. Compared with the fury and urgency of its contemporaries, Whitemore’s play is quieter, more restrained, and more inclined toward portraiture than protest. But in 1988, that gesture had weight.

More than 30 years later, Central Square Theater has revived Whitemore’s play in a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT production directed by Scott Edmiston and starring Eddie Shields as the brilliant, eccentric mathematician. It is easy to understand why the play occupies an important place in gay dramatic history. It is less easy to ignore how dated it now seems.

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In 1988, portraying a gay man as a hero rather than simply a victim was still unusual, and Breaking the Code arrived at a moment when that mattered. But the play was doing something else as well: introducing Alan Turing to audiences less familiar with his contributions than they are today. This was the man who helped crack the German military’s code during World War II, work that gave the Allies a decisive advantage, and whose thinking helped lay the foundations of modern computing—before being prosecuted for gross indecency, subjected to chemical castration, and dying by suicide at 41; a formal royal pardon would not come until 2013. His life had its tragedies, but here they carried a particular shock: that a man who had helped win the war could be treated this way by his own government because he was gay. The point landed simply and, for its time, forcefully.

In 2026, audiences generally no longer need to be introduced to Alan Turing, and queer representation is far more mainstream than it was nearly 40 years ago—thankfully. The figure the play so carefully presents is now widely known, his life and legacy long since absorbed into the culture, not least through the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which, like the play, draws on Andrew Hodges’s biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. The story is still told, piece by piece, but it all just feels too familiar—and a little dusty—to be especially engaging. Its radicalism has expired.

The result is a play that remains respectable without ever becoming engrossing, well-acted but not quite entertaining. It moves between Turing’s wartime codebreaking and the investigation that would later lead to his arrest. Its non-linear structure parcels out information but never quite gathers momentum, the evening advancing in fits and starts, the cumulative effect more dutiful than dramatic. One senses the shape of the story, but rarely its urgency, a problem for a play that runs so needlessly long. It is also odd that the play never quite conveys the scale of Turing’s achievement, not even in a newly added epilogue that interrupts the ending’s bleakness, only to replace it with something more simplified and overly neat.

There may be no Boston actor better equipped to play Turing than Eddie Shields, who has, over the past decade, become the city’s most persuasive interpreter of a certain lineage of gay roles—fragile, searching, often exquisitely exposed. He has returned to that terrain in productions of Angels in America, The Inheritance, and A Man of No Importance, among others, and while the performances are never interchangeable, they draw on similar instincts, a similar emotional register. By now, that kind of mastery risks being taken for granted, but Shields is remarkable here, even when the material gives him little to push against. What he brings, as ever, is an interior life that feels fully inhabited.

In supporting roles, Dom Carter, Paula Plum, and Josephine Moshiri Elwood are reliably strong, give or take an accent, though the script leaves them limited room to make a lasting impression. David Bryan Jackson and Matthew Beagan provide sturdy support, especially Beagan, who is unstudied and versatile across four roles as the young men in Turing’s life.

Director Scott Edmiston frames the action with a vaguely Brechtian device, seating actors along the margins of the stage, though what it accomplishes is unclear. The device appears only intermittently, and to little effect. The performances themselves remain in fine concert, but the staging can feel overly arranged; a late first-act interrogation is a particular casualty of the occasionally blocky staging.

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There is also an overtly literal attempt to connect the play’s visual world to Turing’s work. The set by Janie E. Howland—industrial pipes, scattered shelving, imprecise lines painted across the stage—has an ungainly, faintly amateurish look that drains the stage of atmosphere, while computer screens, with their screensaver-level visuals and AI renderings of Turing, are simply unattractive. Karen Perlow’s lighting, Chloe Moore’s costumes, and Aubrey Dube’s sound design offer some relief, but the stage picture remains thin.

Breaking the Code endures as an important play in the history of gay representation. But importance is not the same as vitality, and here the two have begun to diverge. It remains a respectable piece, clearly made and ably performed, yet rarely engaging. Even so, Eddie Shields brings a disciplined intelligence and rare presence to Turing. At times, it is enough.

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Breaking the Code. Through May at Central Square Theater, Cambridge. www.centralsquaretheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

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There was a moment not so long ago when the Constitution still felt, if not secure, then at least intact. It’s always been flawed, certainly, and uneven in its reach, but it carried an underlying assurance.

When Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me premiered Off-Broadway in 2018, it met that assumption directly. It arrived early in the Trump years, before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the subsequent reshaping of the Court that would culminate in Dobbs. The play is built on the idea that, however imperfectly, the Constitution still functions as a safeguard. What has followed has made that assumption harder to sustain.

At Greater Boston Stage Company, where A. Nora Long’s revival plays through April 26, that shift is apparent from the start. Here, the piece—once fleet, even nimble—now sits heavily, the evening taking on the air of an overlong school presentation. The issue isn’t simply that the play now shows its age, though it does, but that Long meets it with a production that does little to counter that effect.

Janis Hudson, cast as Heidi Schreck—the onstage version of the playwright herself—brings with her the quickness and comic alertness that have made her such a vivid presence elsewhere, but those qualities have little room to register. She is asked instead to smooth the material into something more presentational, delivering rather than discovering it. The result is not a misjudged performance so much as a contained one, the material giving her little to play beyond its own steady stream of talk. One can sense, now and then, the livelier, more mercurial version of the play that might exist under different circumstances. The production is not helped by an eyesore of a set or by the annoying house lights left on for much of the show, though Joseph Marrella is well cast as the Legionnaire.

There is also the matter of authorship. What the Constitution Means to Me was conceived as a solo act of self-exposure, written by Heidi Schreck to be spoken by Heidi Schreck, and some of its force dissipates when that voice is borrowed by another actor. What registered as firsthand confession takes on the texture of reenactment, which isn’t only less interesting but also less effective, as was evident in the 2022 national tour starring Cassie Beck.

Even in a more effective production, though, the deeper problem would remain. The play treats the Constitution as a document that is flawed and incomplete, but ultimately stable. In the years since its premiere, that premise has grown harder to accept. After sustained court reshaping and the rollback of established rights, the Constitution no longer reliably reads as a mechanism of progress so much as something that can shift abruptly against the people it is meant to protect. That change alone unsettles the play’s central logic.

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The tension is most visible in the play’s treatment of abortion. Schreck carefully traces how privacy rights were constructed through constitutional interpretation, building toward Roe v. Wade as a hard-won, if imperfect, achievement. But Dobbs has since undone that framework entirely, rejecting the reasoning the play takes such care to explain. Here, the system is presented as working—slowly, unevenly, but meaningfully. Now, it reads as provisional at best.

Formally, the piece remains what it has always been: a hybrid of memoir and civics lesson, drawn from Schreck’s teenage experience in American Legion speech contests and structured around her return to those arguments as an adult. She moves between past and present, personal anecdote and legal history, tracing how the Constitution has operated in the lives of women in her family. The aim is to bring the document down from abstraction, to show it as something lived with rather than simply studied.

But the method is relentlessly explicit. Ideas are explained, then re-explained; stories are shaped to point in a single direction. What might have felt clarifying now lands with a certain heaviness, even a dullness. Even the closing debate, intended to open the piece outward, has the feel of a classroom exercise—orderly and well-meaning, but canned and faintly phony.

This landed differently when the play premiered in 2018. It met an audience newly anxious about the durability of democratic norms but still inclined to believe that those norms could be defended. Schreck’s voice—earnest, explanatory, forward-looking—fit that moment. It suggested that understanding the system and tracing its logic might itself be a meaningful act.

Critics at the time embraced it in those terms, calling it “the most important play” of the season and treating it as a form of civic engagement—a work that seemed to register as action in itself. The play functioned, in part, as reassurance.

Eight years on, that faith feels less secure. The play hasn’t changed, but the conditions under which it is heard have. It now sits awkwardly in the present, its urgency dulled by a reality that has moved past it.

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What the Constitution Means to Me. Runs through April 26 at Greater Boston Stage Company, Stoneham. www.greaterbostonstage.org. Running time: 90 minutes.

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Boston Theater Critics Association’s 43rd Annual Elliot Norton Awards

2026 Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence
Bill Hanney

Special Citations
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in honor of its 30th Anniversary Season

Blue Man Group in honor of its 30-year residency in Boston

Arts administrators Temple Gill and Jim Torres in honor of their decades of service to the theater community

2026 Elliot Norton Arts Education Award
Open Door Theater, which has been making theater accessible on both sides of the curtain since 1980. They are one of the only integrated, accessible theater troupes in the nation to stage full-scale high-quality productions featuring actors who are Deaf, Blind, Disabled, Autistic and Neurodiverse. All Open Door Theater productions are ASL interpreted, Open Captioned, Sensory Friendly and Audio Described.

Visiting Awardees

Outstanding Visiting Play
Our Class, Arlekin

Outstanding Visiting Musical
Suffs, Broadway In Boston

Outstanding Performance in a Visiting Musical
Sam Tutty, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), American Repertory Theater

Outstanding Performance in a Visiting Play
Chulpan Khamatova, Our Class, Arlekin

Outstanding Visiting Solo Performance
Eddie Izzard, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Boch Center

Nominations

Outstanding Play, Large
Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington
The Hills of California, The Huntington in association with Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Misery, Merrimack Repertory Theatre
We Had a World, The Huntington
What You Are Now, Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Outstanding Play, Midsize
The Garbologists, Gloucester Stage
The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, SpeakEasy Stage
The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater
Our Town, Lyric Stage Boston

Outstanding Play, Small
the beautiful land I seek (la linda tierra que busco yo), Teatro Chelsea
Is This a Room, Apollinaire Theatre Company
The Meeting Tree, Company One Theatre with Front Porch Arts Collective
Mother Mary, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collective

Outstanding Musical
Crowns, Moonbox Productions
Fun Home, The Huntington
The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Rent, North Shore Music Theatre
tick, tick…BOOM!, The Umbrella Stage Company

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Outstanding Lead Performance in a Play, Large
Will Conard, We Had a World, The Huntington
Nora Eschenheimer, As You Like It, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
Karen MacDonald, Misery, Merrimack Repertory Theatre
Jessica Pimentel, Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington
Allison Jean White, The Hills of California, The Huntington with Berkeley Rep

Outstanding Lead Performance in a Play, Midsize
Thomika Marie Bridwell, The Garbologists, Gloucester Stage
Josephine Moshiri Elwood, Job, SpeakEasy Stage
Paul Melendy, Featherbaby, Greater Boston Stage Company
Paul Melendy, The Garbologists, Gloucester Stage
Nael Nacer, The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater

Outstanding Lead Performance in a Play, Small
Adriana Alvarez, Mother Mary, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
Dominic Carter, The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collective
Tara Forseth, Mother Mary, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
Parker Jennings, Is This a Room, Apollinaire Theatre Company
Nathaniel Justiniano, the beautiful land I seek (la linda tierra que busco yo),Teatro Chelsea

Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play, Large
Sonnie Brown, What You Are Now, Merrimack Repertory Theatre
Kate Fitzgerald, The Hills of California, The Huntington with Berkeley Rep
Evelyn Howe, Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington
Eva Kaminsky, We Had a World, The Huntington
Amy Resnick, We Had a World, The Huntington

Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play, Midsize
Liza Giangrande, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
De’Lon Grant, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Josephine Moshiri Elwood, Our Town, Lyric Stage Boston
Patrick O’Konis, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Jules Talbot, The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater

Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play, Small
Sehnaz Dirik, A View from the Bridge, Apollinaire Theatre Company
Nicholas Papayoanou, You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!, Company One
Jacqui Parker, The Meeting Tree, Company One with Front Porch Arts Collective
Kiera Prusmack, The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collective
Adrian Roberts, The Ceremony, CHUANG Stage with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

Outstanding Lead Performance in a Musical
Sehnaz Dirik, Blood Brothers, Theater UnCorked
Liza Giangrande, The Spitfire Grill, The Umbrella Stage Company
Didi Romero, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre
Johnny Shea, tick, tick…BOOM!, The Umbrella Stage Company
Emily Skinner, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington

Outstanding Featured Performance in a Musical
Aaron Arnell Harrington, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre
Vanessa Calantropo, tick, tick…BOOM!, The Umbrella Stage Company
Joshua Grosso, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Sarah-Anne Martinez, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Lyla Randall, Fun Home, The Huntington

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Outstanding Choreography
Rachel Bertone, Evita, Reagle Music Theatre
Briana Fallon, The Wizard of Oz, North Shore Music Theatre
Hallie Nowicki, Sweeney Claus: The Demon Father of Sleet Street, Gold Dust Orphans
Ilyse Robbins, tick, tick…BOOM!, The Umbrella Stage Company
Marcos Santana, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre

Outstanding Music Direction
David Coleman, Crowns, Moonbox Productions
Andrea Grody, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Jordan Oczkowski, tick, tick...BOOM!, The Umbrella Stage Company
Jessie Rosso, Fun Home, The Huntington
Robert L. Rucinski, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre

Outstanding Director, Large
Logan Ellis, Fun Home, The Huntington
Loretta Greco, The Hills of California, The Huntington with Berkeley Rep
Loretta Greco, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
David Mendizábal, Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington
Marcos Santana, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre

Outstanding Director, Midsize
Doug Lockwood, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Jared Mezzocchi, The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater
Ilyse Robbins, tick, tick…BOOM!, The Umbrella Stage Company
Regine Vital, Crowns, Moonbox Productions
Summer L. Williams, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, SpeakEasy Stage

Outstanding Director, Small
Danielle Fauteux Jacques, Is This a Room, Apollinaire Theatre Company
David R. Gammons, A View from the Bridge, Apollinaire Theatre Company
Maurice Emmanuel Parent, The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collective
Armando Rivera, the beautiful land I seek (la linda tierra que busco yo), Teatro Chelsea
Elaine Vaan Hogue, Mother Mary, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

Outstanding Scenic Design, Large
Andrew Boyce, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Andrew Boyce and Se Hyun Oh, The Hills of California, The Huntington
Ryan M. Howell, The Wizard of Oz, North Shore Music Theatre
Tanya Orellana, Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington
Tanya Orellana, Fun Home, The Huntington

Outstanding Scenic Design, Midsize or Small
Janie E. Howland, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, SpeakEasy Stage
Ben Lieberson and Pamela Hersch, The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collectivein Jenna McFarland Lord, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Cristina Todesco, The Meeting Tree, Company One with Front Porch Arts Collective
Sibyl Wickersheimer and Jared Mezzocchi, The Moderate, a CatalystCollaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater

Outstanding Lighting Design, Large
Christopher Akerlind, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Bradley King, Wonder, American Repertory Theater
Jack Mehler, The Wizard of Oz, North Shore Music Theatre
Philip Rosenberg, Fun Home, The Huntington
Cha See, Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington

Outstanding Lighting Design, Midsize or Small
Amanda Fallon, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Kevin Fulton, The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater
Brian Lilienthal, The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collective
Elmer Martinez, Macbeth, Actors’ Shakespeare Project
Eduardo M. Ramirez, Silent Sky, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production atCentral Square Theater

Outstanding Costume Design, Large
Miranda Giurleo, As You Like It, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
Rebecca Glick, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre
Alex Jaeger, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
Celeste Jennings, Fun Home, The Huntington
Jennifer von Mayrhauser, The Hills of California, The Huntington with Berkeley Rep

Outstanding Costume Design, Midsize or Small
Seth Bodie, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Actors’ Shakespeare Project
Danielle Domingue Sumi, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, SpeakEasy Stage
Chloe Moore, The Ceremony, CHUANG Stage with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
E. Rosser, Crowns, Moonbox Productions
Nia Safarr Banks, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage

Outstanding Sound Design, Large
Alex Berg, Rent, North Shore Music Theatre
Megumi Katayama, The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
David Remedios, Misery, Merrimack Repertory Theatre
Jake Rodriguez with Alexandra Buschman-Román and Jason Stamberger, “Don’t Eat the Mangos,” The Huntington
David Van Tieghem, The Hills of California, The Huntington withBerkeley Rep

Outstanding Sound Design, Midsize or Small
Julian Crocamo, The Garbologists, Gloucester Stage
Aubrey Dube, The Glass Menagerie, Gloucester Stage
Christian Frederickson, The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater
Joshua Jackson, The Mountaintop, Front Porch Arts Collective
Joseph Lark-Riley, Is This a Room, Apollinaire Theatre Company

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Outstanding Solo Performance
Kevin Kling, Kevin Kling: Unraveled, Merrimack Repertory Theatre
Valyn Lyric Turner, No Child…, Gloucester Stage

Outstanding New Script
Sam Chanse, What You Are Now, Merrimack Repertory Theatre
B. Elle Borders, The Meeting Tree, Company One with Front Porch Arts Collective
KJ Moran Velz, Mother Mary, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
David Templeton, Featherbaby, Greater Boston Stage Company
Ken Urban, The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater

Outstanding Ensemble
Crowns, Moonbox Productions
Don’t Eat the Mangos, The Huntington
The Hills of California, The Huntington in association with Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, SpeakEasy Stage
The Light in the Piazza, The Huntington
The Meeting Tree, Company One Theatre with Front Porch Arts Collective
The Moderate, a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production at Central Square Theater
Our Town, Lyric Stage Boston
Rent, North Shore Music Theatre
Sweeney Claus: The Demon Father of Sleet Street, Gold Dust Orphans

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Matthew Lombardo’s When Playwrights Kill begins with a piece of theater lore: in 2003, during previews for Rose’s Dilemma, Mary Tyler Moore received a last-minute letter from Neil Simon telling her to learn the lines or leave the play. Delivered by Simon’s wife just before she was due onstage, it became a small scandal of theatrical cruelty — a legend of backstage humiliation involving one of Broadway’s last giants and one of television’s most beloved stars.

The anecdote is there to elevate what follows — and to place Lombardo, not entirely modestly, in the same company. It frames the evening as a backstage clash between playwright and actress, a story of authority, ego, and collapse. Lombardo has his own version of that story — his 2019 public unraveling with Faye Dunaway during Tea at Five right here in Boston — and here it is repurposed, its origins only lightly disguised.

Lombardo’s new play, which had its world premiere Friday evening at the Huntington Theatre—the very stage where Dunaway appeared in Tea at Five—turns that history into material: a grievance play masquerading as backstage farce.

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A young playwright (Tony winner Matt Doyle), newly on the brink of Broadway, has written a one-woman play he believes will get him there. The actress, Brooke Remington (Tony winner Beth Leavel), arrives with an Oscar, a long absence from the stage, and a reputation for volatility matched only by her inability to remember lines. A fast-talking, morally flexible producer (Adam Heller) insists she is the only viable commercial choice; a well-meaning director (Kevin Chamberlin) goes along with it; and a long-suffering stage manager (Tony winner Marissa Jaret Winokur) tries her best to keep things running. The production heads to Boston for an out-of-town tryout, just as Tea at Five did.

What follows is a string of delays, tantrums, missed cues, and mounting panic, along with the creeping sense that things may collapse before reaching an audience. Brooke cannot remember her lines, derails rehearsals, and tests the patience of everyone involved while the playwright — Lombardo’s thinly disguised surrogate — watches his Broadway ambitions slip away. But he does have a plan: he suggests feeding Brooke Adderall before each performance, followed by barbiturates to “put her down like a dog until the following day.” (Classy.) He also proposes an earpiece so her lines can be fed to her—something Dunaway actually used in Tea at Five. The producer claims he knows just the person to help: Tobias Deschanel (Tomás Matos), known by his street name, Val Le’Emm, a two-time Rikers inmate hired to feed both lines and drugs to the struggling diva. The play finally opens, and critics praise Brooke but dismiss his play. Stung by the imbalance, he arrives at a solution as nonsensical as it is drastic: Brooke Remington must die.

In practice, it wants to be a ruthless backstage farce about vanity, celebrity rot, and theatrical bloodsport. What it mostly delivers is a long sulk: a playwright-avatar nursing a humiliation fantasy about a monstrous aging actress.

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When Playwrights Kill is openly rooted in the implosion of Lombardo’s own Tea at Five. Brooke Remington is clearly based on Faye Dunaway—so much so that Leavel has reportedly asked Huntington Theatre staff for stories to inform her performance. The outline is familiar: an Oscar-winning film legend, long absent from the stage, attempting a late-career comeback through a Boston tryout, undone by erratic behavior and trouble with the text. Lombardo has taken that episode and repurposed it as farce, sanding down specifics just enough to preserve deniability while retaining the essential humiliation as comic fuel.

The public record of Tea at Five does not simply describe an actress behaving badly. It also describes a play critics found thin to begin with — a minor piece revived largely because Dunaway agreed to do it. Reviews of the Boston run repeatedly noted her instability — missed lines, uneven performances — while conceding flashes of presence that reminded you why she remains a star. What they did not suggest was that the play could survive without her.

And that is par for the course with Lombardo’s plays. Without Kathleen Turner, High was widely dismissed as a hollow contrivance barely held together by her presence. Without Valerie Harper, Looped was described as whisper-thin and cruel, its appeal lying less in the writing than in the spectacle of one famous actress embodying another. And as Patti Hartigan wrote in the Globe, Dunaway “deserves a stronger cup of tea”—a line that neatly captures the imbalance Lombardo now seems eager to rewrite.

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The very women this play wants to ridicule — the famous, overripe, combustible leading ladies in search of a late-career showcase — are the women who have repeatedly given Lombardo access to Broadway oxygen. The insult in this play is not merely misogynistic or ageist, though it certainly flirts with both. It is ungrateful.

Lombardo has built a career on that equation. He needs these women to get the play onstage, yet writes as if their prominence were some vulgar injustice done to him. He bemoans the idea that a famous actress is destroying his play when she is, in fact, the only thing giving it life. When Playwrights Kill turns that resentment outward, the result is particularly sour: a mean-spirited attack on a still-living film legend whose career far exceeds the material attempting to diminish it.

The play takes shots at more than Dunaway—Actors’ Equity, the Dramatists Guild, and a string of actors, including Cicely Tyson, Laura Linney, and Al Pacino. The aggressive fixation on Actors’ Equity, in particular, lands strangely. The play’s humor is lazy in a specifically theatrical way: smug about the business, broad about people, and incurious about either. “All actors are difficult,” “all actors are crazy,” producers as grotesques, Broadway as a sewer of money and ego — none of this is wrong enough to be shocking or right enough to be incisive.

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In a particularly crass sequence, the play reduces Brooke to a string of cheap indignities: reaching for pills, slipping off to the bathroom, returning unsteady, finally passing out mid-rehearsal. By this point in the play, it has already been established that Brooke is a barely disguised version of Faye Dunaway, who in real life has spoken publicly about her bipolar disorder and the role medication plays in managing it—a condition that has informed some of the behavior that became public. That context doesn’t sit outside the scene; it alters it. What might register as coarse farce instead reads as something meaner—a bit of stage business that turns a real, complicated history into a joke, flattening the most humiliating and medically fraught elements of a real woman’s late-life public unraveling into camp contraband.

Brooke herself is a failure of imagination. She is designed as a spectacular star turn, but the play never decides whether she is terrifying, tragic, cunning, strung out, genuinely gifted, or merely incompetent. To watch Leavel create Brooke is a true joy, not merely because she won a Tony twenty years ago for playing a version of this inebriated diva, but because she is doing here what Lombardo’s plays have always required of their leading ladies: supplying what the writing cannot.

The cast is uniformly good, if unremarkable, apart from Leavel and Tomás Matos as the prompter. The role, the play’s only person of color, is sketched as a sexually opportunistic schemer and drug dealer, his dialogue stuffed with the broadest, most stereotypical slang. Every appearance leans on the same crude shorthand, a stack of clichés doing the work of character. And yet Matos is electric, squeezing every moment for comic effect and nearly making it work—a feat matched by Noah Himmelstein’s direction, which manages to keep the whole enterprise watchable.

Little more than thinly veiled axe grinding by a playwright and his creative team, When Playwrights Kill is sporadically funny in the cheapest sense, though the excellent cast provides what pleasure there is.

What remains, finally, is not outrage so much as embarrassment.

Not for Dunaway, or for the actresses Lombardo so transparently resents, but for the play itself, which, in its eagerness to expose the indignities of the theatrical ecosystem and to air its author’s grievances, reveals something smaller and sadder: a playwright who, when stripped of the performers he depends on, has nothing of substance to fall back on.

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WHEN PLAYWRIGHTS KILL. Through April 18 at The Huntington Theatre, Boston. www.whenplaywrightskillboston.com. Running time: 2 hours.

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Mary Shelley is having a curious afterlife at the moment.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, she appears as an exhumed specter, pressing herself back into her own myth. In Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, now in its final week at SpeakEasy Stage, a pre-Frankenstein Shelley is found at Lake Geneva, toying with the notion that life might be created by human hands.

The Bride! has inspired some especially tart notices — one critic calling it “a meandering, momentum-free disaster.” The Antiquities proves no less disappointing. Not because Harrison’s play is a lost cause, but because this production makes it seem like one.

The Antiquities is built as a museum of human life, assembled from the vantage point of a future in which we no longer exist. Two curators — not human, but post-human — guide the audience through a series of exhibits, scenes drawn from different moments in history that mark the development of human invention and its consequences. We begin with Mary Shelley, imagining the possibility of artificial life. From there, the play moves through industrial labor and early computing — as humans bend themselves to machines and teach them to think — and eventually to systems that no longer require the people who created them. Individually, these scenes are modest, but their job is to gather force. Each marks another step in the trajectory: we invent, we rely, and eventually we are replaced.

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That trajectory is not especially subtle, but it can be effective. The play’s real interest lies in what can be reproduced and what cannot. The curators are clearly not human in Harrison’s script — though director Alex Lonati, with her usual misjudgment, makes that unmistakable. They are the post-human intelligences who have replaced us, reconstructing these exhibits. They can reconstruct human behavior with remarkable precision. They can reproduce speech, environment, even intimacy. What they cannot fully account for are the internal states that give those behaviors (and human life in general) meaning — grief, desire, the awareness of our own mortality. That distinction is the play’s central idea, and what gives it weight.

For any of this to register, two things have to happen. The scenes have to feel like they are building toward something, each one clearly in service of the larger arc rather than existing as a loose vignette. And the behavior inside them has to make visible the limits of the reconstruction — not broadly or bluntly, but in small, specific ways we can see and hear. Under Alex Lonati’s direction, neither condition is met.

In this unfocused, DOA production, the audience — the ones still awake, anyway — is left not with a haunting pattern but with a series of scenes that feel arbitrary, inert, and increasingly exhausting. Moments that should carry enormous weight drift by without urgency or definition. In one of the play’s central sequences, a tech employee tries to convince a group of lawyers — clearly there to contain the fallout — that the artificial intelligence they have developed has achieved sentience, a moment that should register as a frightening turning point, the instant when humanity crosses a threshold it cannot reverse. Harrison writes the stakes plainly: this is the beginning of the end. Here, it barely registers at all — just another bland exchange of lines, drained of urgency, with no sense of what is at stake and no indication that anyone onstage understands what they are fighting for. Such absence of intention extends across the entire production.

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Compounding the problem is a directorial concept that works against the play at nearly every turn. The museum’s curators are presented with flattened, Siri-like vocal affect and scene transitions are punctuated by robotic movement and electronic sound. The implication is blunt: these are machines. But that is not what Harrison has written. They are not observers from the outside. They are what comes after us —our successors. They should look, sound, and behave almost exactly like we do. The unease of the play depends on that proximity — on the sense that the difference is slight, but consequential.

The script allows for only the slightest distortions — small, telling imperfections in how human behavior is reconstructed. A gesture that lands a beat too late. A tone that doesn’t quite match the moment. The gap is meant to be narrow: close enough to feel recognizable, distant enough to feel wrong. This production replaces that precision with blunt invention. At one point, characters drink from cups in a manner that resembles animals lapping from a bowl — a choice so inexplicable it borders on parody. It does not suggest an advanced intelligence struggling to grasp human nuance; it suggests a failure to grasp basic human behavior. If these beings are capable of reconstructing entire eras of human life, they would certainly know how a person drinks from a cup. It’s moments like this that make you almost feel bad for the play itself.

In another example of thoughtless stagecraft, a memorial scene involving a mother and her late daughter’s friends, who describe a version of her that the mother does not recognize, is completely destroyed by a distracting accent. The scene is one of Harrison’s clearest attempts to show what these future beings cannot grasp: the emotional reality inside the facts. There are only two explanations. Either the actress is attempting an accent she cannot do — one the script does not even call for — or the distortion is a directorial flourish meant to suggest that, of course the accent is wrong, we are watching a non-human reconstruction or human life. If it’s the former, yikes. If it’s the latter, the point is missed entirely. An intelligence like this would not approximate an accent; it would reproduce it perfectly. For God’s sake, AI can do that now. Either way, the choice is nonsensical, and it stands as a particularly low moment in a production full of them.

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Harrison’s play ultimately hinges on the distinction between what can be replicated and what cannot. Human intelligence, human systems, even human behavior — these may all be reproducible. But the emotional and existential core of human life — grief, desire, the awareness of mortality — may not be. That is what gives the play its weight. And that is what this production never allows us to see.

Near the end of the play, the curators fixate on the defining fact of human existence: that we lived our lives knowing everything would end. “How could they bear it?” they ask. It is the question the entire play has been moving toward, and it should land with force — not as a philosophical abstraction, but as a genuine expression of disbelief. These successors can account for everything we did. What they cannot comprehend is how we went on living knowing that everything would end. Here, their question barely registers.

Harrison’s play may not be perfect. But it contains something genuinely unsettling — a vision of humanity not as the center of the story, but as a brief and fragile phase within it. The figures who inherit that world can reproduce human behavior, but not fully grasp it. Lonati runs into the same problem: she can stage the play’s form, but not its meaning.

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The Antiquities. Through March 28 at SpeakEasy Stage, Boston. speakeasystage.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

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“I’m here to tell you how the world died. It’ll be mostly fun.”

It’s an odd promise for a play about climate change and terminal illness. Yet against all odds, Keiko Green’s play makes good on it.

You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, directed by Shawn LaCount for Company One Theatre, walks a delicate tonal line. The play circles catastrophe — environmental, personal, existential — yet it remains consistently, disarmingly funny.

The evening is guided by M (Kai Clifton), a glitter-dusted emcee who introduces the story with a cosmic flourish before narrowing the lens to something painfully ordinary: a doctor’s office and a diagnosis. From that moment on, Green’s play moves restlessly between narration and scene, spectacle and domestic chaos, as one family absorbs the news that Greg (Michael Tow) — husband, father, reluctant prophet — is dying.

But the diagnosis doesn’t exactly settle over the household with total solemnity. It knocks everything off its hinges. Viv (Jade Guerra), Greg’s wife and M’s mother, meets catastrophe with a ferocious need to manage it. Greg, meanwhile, begins drifting toward something else entirely as late-night nature documentaries turn into feverish hallucinations, leading him to believe that the terminal cancer inside him and the damage being done to the planet might somehow be connected — an idea that sends the play spinning outward into a lively orbit of relatives, boyfriends, support-group confidants, and even animals.

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Around Greg’s ever-expanding conclusions gathers a gallery of sharply drawn figures: Will (the excellent Nicholas Papayoanou), M’s earnest boyfriend whose dinner-table monologue about corporate carbon emissions tips into an uncanny comic rant; Janet (Alex Alexander), a flinty support-group veteran who meets Viv’s brittle composure with bracing bluntness; and Lila (Anjie Parker), Viv’s wellness-obsessed sister, forever arriving with organic carrots and dubious miracle cures. Under LaCount’s direction, the ensemble slips between these characters — and a host of others — with remarkable agility. What might feel like theatrical whiplash instead becomes part of the production’s pleasure. Before long, the play pushes into stranger territory, as Greg’s theories about the planet’s fate summon extinct animals, environmental prophets, and other unlikely visitors.

LaCount’s staging embraces the play’s restless shape rather than trying to tame it. The production moves with a loose, inventive energy that allows Green’s leaps of tone — from grief to absurdity and back again — to land without strain or silliness. Remarkably, it all feels both believable and faintly bewitching — a tribute to LaCount and his cast. Inventive projections (by Nitsan Scharf) help expand the modest playing space into something far more vivid.

Michael Tow makes Greg’s strange awakening deeply convincing. Faced with the blunt fact of his own mortality, Greg begins noticing things he once ignored — the trees outside the house, the dirt beneath his feet. We believe this man is dying. Just as importantly, we believe that he believes the increasingly wild conclusions he draws about the fate of the planet. Tow plays the role with an open, unaffected sincerity that keeps Greg human even as the play sends him down some improbable paths.

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Kai Clifton’s M presides over the evening as its emcee. But the performance reveals its real strength in the quieter moments, when the narration drops away and M is left inside the family’s private grief. Where another actor might push toward anger or operatic sorrow, Clifton goes smaller, weighing each thought before letting it land. That restraint makes the grief feel real. In a late hospital scene, as M speaks to Greg, the performance reveals its deepest current: a child realizing their parent is disappearing before they’ve fully figured each other out. Jade Guerra gives the play its emotional ballast as Viv, and is especially impressive when that composure finally slips, revealing something far more fragile underneath.

LaCount’s ensemble cast is a constant source of surprise. Nicholas Papayoanou proves a comic force of nature, sliding from M’s awkwardly endearing boyfriend to a parade of unexpected figures — a blustering Army Guy, an ominous nature-documentary narrator, even an extinct rodent — each drawn with such crisp specificity that the joke never wears thin. Alex Alexander is just as deft, creating sharply etched characters, from a nurse with the bedside warmth of a parking meter to an outraged neighborhood Karen. But Alexander’s finest moments arrive as a roofer whose wife is dying — bristly at first, then broken, and finally unexpectedly kind. Anjie Parker is equally memorable as Viv’s sister Lila and again in one of the play’s more surreal turns as Greta Thunberg — yes, Greta Thunberg.

Green’s play is not a tidy piece of dramaturgy. It sprawls, detours, and occasionally wanders into territory that feels a little loony even by its own surreal standards (and the closing dance-party coda is in desperate need of a choreographer). Yet the strangest thing of all is that it works. Somehow all the oddness — the heightened narration, the climate parables, the sudden leaps into theatrical fantasy — gathers into something unexpectedly moving, imperfect but marvelous.

Beneath all its eccentric detours, the play keeps circling a simple question: how people live with the knowledge that everything ends. It can look like a climate parable, a surreal family drama, even a kind of theatrical ritual for confronting grief. Again and again, Green’s play shows people trying to make sense of catastrophe — turning fear, grief, and bewilderment into stories, jokes, arguments, and rituals. In other words, the evening makes good on its promise: a story about the end of the world turns out to be, against all odds, mostly fun.

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You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World. Through March 28 at Company One Theatre at the Boston Public Library. companyone.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

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Great music, Stereophonic suggests, is rarely the product of harmony.

The play unfolds inside a 1970s recording studio, where a band on the cusp of fame is inching toward an album. But the music itself is almost incidental. Playwright David Adjmi is more interested in the act of creation — people who depend on one another professionally even as their relationships begin to fray or even combust.

The play is a portrait of collaboration at its most fragile, revealing both the beauty and the brutality behind art that ultimately survives its creators.

Seen from that angle, Stereophonic belongs in a rare lineage of American masterpieces about the art of making art. A Chorus Line did it for dancers. Sunday in the Park with George did it for painting. Adjmi does it for rock music. Like those works, it finds its drama in the slow, messy process of creation.

Stereophonic is the most Tony-nominated play in Broadway history, eventually winning five awards, including Best Play. The tour preserves that same production, directed again by Daniel Aukin and performed by a company that is about as fine as it gets, in more ways than one.

Sunday afternoon is the final performance in Boston. Miss it and live to regret it.

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Stereophonic. Through March 15 at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, Boston. www.emersoncolonialtheatre.com. Running time: 3 hours.

This production of A View from the Bridge begins with a chorus of voices, the actors speaking over one another in different languages until the words dissolve into a blur of sound. For a moment, the stage feels less like a Brooklyn waterfront than a meeting point of many worlds.

It is a striking way to begin Arthur Miller’s tragedy, and a clear signal that director David R. Gammons is not interested in presenting the play as a strict period piece. In a thrilling revival at Apollinaire Theatre Company, Gammons leans into Brechtian theatricality with a multicultural ensemble that broadens the play’s frame beyond the Italian-American community in which it was originally set.

At the center of the story is Eddie Carbone (Jorge Rubio), a Brooklyn longshoreman living with his wife Beatrice (Sehnaz Dirik) and their niece Catherine (Naomi Kim), whom he has helped raise. Their household is unsettled when two undocumented relatives arrive from Italy seeking work: the quiet, intense Marco (Rohan Misra) and his younger brother, Rodolfo (Andres Molano Sotomayor), whose easy charm quickly draws Catherine’s attention. Eddie’s unease about Rodolfo appears almost immediately, his protective concern soon giving way to jealousy, resentment, and something darker still: a possessiveness neither he nor anyone around him is willing to name.

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Gammons’s production understands that A View from the Bridge is not merely a domestic tragedy with immigration hovering in the background. Immigration lies at the center of the play. Red Hook, like many immigrant enclaves past and present, survives on unspoken agreements: loyalty to neighbors, silence about certain things, and a shared instinct not to invite outside scrutiny. The arrival of two undocumented relatives quickly strains that fragile balance, exposing the tension between private resentment and the community’s code of silence.

Rodolfo unsettles Eddie in ways he cannot quite explain. The younger man sings, cooks, and laughs easily with Catherine, moving through the household with an ease that disturbs Eddie’s rigid sense of what a man should be. His protectiveness toward Catherine starts to look less like care than possession, his authority less like responsibility than a claim. Seen from that angle, Miller’s tragedy is not driven by heroic ambition but by something far smaller and more corrosive: a masculinity built on control and entitlement. The play becomes, finally, a study in the smallness of that masculinity.

Jorge Rubio’s Eddie is not especially imposing, but a man whose authority has long gone unquestioned — the everyday dominance of a household patriarch. Rubio is most compelling as that authority begins to warp, tipping the character toward something volatile and unsettling. The unraveling feels dangerous. At times, however, the performance turns tentative and Eddie’s emotional through-line grows less precise. In several key moments, Rubio’s intentions remain difficult to read, leaving scenes that should register as shocking oddly ambiguous.

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Naomi Kim’s Catherine is particularly compelling in her rendering of the character’s emotional awakening, especially in a quiet moment when recognition flickers across her face as she begins to grasp the unsettling nature of her uncle’s attachment. Sehnaz Dirik is remarkable as Beatrice, revealing through small reactions a depth of understanding that often exceeds the words she is given. Andres Molano Sotomayor brings a gentle sincerity to Rodolfo, making him an appealing partner for Catherine, though the performance occasionally feels too soft-spoken to fully ignite the conflict the play requires.

David R. Gammons directs with a confident embrace of stylization, treating Miller’s tragedy not as naturalistic domestic drama but as openly theatrical storytelling. Scenes unfold with heightened physicality and a clear sense of design, constantly reminding us that this is a story being presented rather than simply lived. The result is a production with distinctive texture and urgency, particularly in Chelsea, where a multicultural ensemble tells an immigrant story in a city shaped by immigration. It’s powerful stuff.

The production is also a handsome piece of stagecraft. Joseph Lark-Riley’s set centers on a raised wooden platform that evokes a waterfront dock — or perhaps a boxing ring — its rope-lined edges giving confrontations the air of prizefights. Around this spare playing space, Gammons moves the action fluidly across the surrounding stage, allowing scenes to spill beyond the platform. Kevin Fulton’s lighting shifts the space from the Carbone apartment to the street and the open night air, while Lark-Riley’s sound design threads waves, music, and low foreboding tones through the action. Together these elements reinforce the production’s stylized approach without overwhelming the human drama.

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For all its visual richness, the production occasionally softens moments that should land with greater force. A View from the Bridge is not only a private tragedy but a communal one, meant to unfold before the watchful eyes of a neighborhood that ultimately turns away from Eddie. Here, however, that sense of public scrutiny sometimes recedes. The conflict can feel contained within the family itself, the surrounding community more implied than visible, and certain pivotal moments register less as public reckoning than as intensely personal collapse. It still works.

What ultimately stands out is the production’s theatrical conviction and the unsettling clarity with which it exposes the cramped emotional world at the center of the play. Gammons and his collaborators approach the work as living theater — bold, stylized, and unafraid of experiment — rather than as a museum artifact. That confidence runs throughout the evening, revealing new urgency in a play now more than seventy years old. In a Boston theater landscape where revivals are often mounted with little sense of adventure, Apollinaire’s production stands apart — mesmerizing, superbly acted, and driven by genuine theatrical nerve.

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A View from the Bridge. Through March 22 at Apollinaire Theatre Company, Chelsea. www.apollinairetheatre.com. Running time: 2 hours.

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There is no shortage of material in Vichet Chum’s new play Kween. Deportation, family fracture, teenage identity, and the cultural inheritance of Cambodian American life in Lowell all circle the story the play wants to tell. In theory, that’s more than enough for a compelling coming-of-age drama. In practice, the play never quite decides which story it wants to tell.

Currently in its world premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theater, Kween centers on Soma, a high school student in Lowell who spends the play preparing for a local spoken-word poetry competition while navigating a family crisis unfolding half a world away. Her father has been deported to Cambodia and appears to be in the midst of a mental health crisis; her mother has flown overseas to deal with the situation, leaving Soma (Pichanny Som) and her older sister, Dahvy (Pisay Pao), to fend for themselves. Around that premise, the play introduces several additional threads: Soma’s friendship with Sophat (Ray K. Soeun), a blossoming romance with Britney (Brittani J. McBridge), her attempts to shape an artistic identity rooted in Lowell’s literary mythology, and Dahvy’s looming wedding to her fiancé, Ruben (Alfredo Antillion). If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is — and very little of it ever gathers any real dramatic weight.

The problem isn’t just the sheer number of plot strings, but that none of them are developed very far. Scenes begin to sketch out situations — between the sisters, around Soma’s artistic ambitions, among her circle of friends — only to drift away before they sharpen into anything substantial. The spoken-word competition hovers over the play throughout the evening, but its stakes are never clearly established, and Soma herself remains a frustratingly opaque protagonist. For most of the play, it remains unclear what Soma actually wants, what she’s working toward, or why any particular moment matters more than another.

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The most consequential event in the story, a father deported and unraveling halfway around the world, remains strangely distant from the action. We are told what happened and why the mother quickly traveled to his side in Cambodia, but the play never explores what that upheaval actually means for the sisters left behind. Instead, the situation lingers at the edges of the narrative, rarely discussed and never fully dramatized — leaving what could be the play’s emotional engine largely untouched. The pattern becomes clear: Kween repeatedly introduces material it never fully explores.

The play briefly introduces another potentially rich thread in its references to Lowell’s literary history. Soma repeatedly invokes Jack Kerouac — born and raised in Lowell —even dubbing herself “Khmer Kerouac.” The comparison could open up an interesting conversation about artistic identity and what it means for a Cambodian American teenager to claim space within Lowell’s literary mythology. But like so much else in Kween, the idea is introduced and then largely abandoned, reducing what might have been a meaningful thematic spine to little more than a passing reference.

Chum’s dialogue only deepens the problem. Much of it strains to sound recognizably youthful rather than simply letting the characters speak. Even the play’s title feels symptomatic of the same impulse. Kween trades on a kind of slangy cultural fluency, though what the word actually means in the context of the story is never quite clear. Cultural references arrive with a similarly forced quality. At one point Soma greets a friend’s attempt at voguing with the line, “I see you’re burning down Paris,” a wink to the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning that feels less like something a Lowell high school student would casually say than a reference planted for the audience to notice. Moments like this give the writing an oddly performative air, as if the play is trying to advertise its cultural fluency rather than letting its characters inhabit it naturally.

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If the script struggles to establish focus, the production (directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh) does little to compensate. Dialogue lands with a stiff, over-rehearsed quality, exchanges unfolding with the careful cadence of actors reciting lines instead of speaking naturally. The problem is compounded in the character of Sophat, Soma’s best friend. Played by Ray K. Soeun with relentless, cartoonish intensity, the character becomes one of the production’s most grating elements — a combination of broadly written, unfunny dialogue and even broader performance that pushes nearly every scene toward forced comedy. The fact that none of the three high school students read like teenagers only adds to the sense that what’s unfolding isn’t believable in any substantial way. The action plays out against a gray-washed house set (by Cristina Todesco) where projections (by Camilla Tassi) smear across the siding in muddy patterns — visual mess projected onto visual mess.

Another thread the play gestures toward but never meaningfully develops is the tension between Soma and her sister. From the beginning, the two move through the play with a low simmer of irritation between them that eventually leads to a late-play apology. But for what, exactly, is never entirely clear. The sister’s situation should be fertile dramatic ground: their father deported and apparently unraveling overseas, their mother gone to manage the crisis, both young women left to absorb the fallout at home. Yet the play never pauses long enough to explore what that rupture actually means for them.

By the time the story arrives at Dahvy’s wedding — theoretically the emotional culmination of the evening — the central relationships have barely been clarified. The celebration that follows feels strangely thin, with a cast too small to create the sense of communal energy the moment demands. In an effort to compensate, a few audience members are invited up to dance during this sequence, which lands less as immersive theater than as an awkward attempt to manufacture spectacle the production itself cannot supply. By play’s end, none of the most consequential questions have been touched.

Over the course of the evening, the audience is introduced to a great many ideas but invited to understand very few of them: a family fractured by deportation, two sisters navigating the aftermath, a young artist trying to find her voice in a city with its own literary mythology. All of it sounds like the ingredients of a rich and complicated play. The irony is that a play trying to be about so much ultimately ends up being about nothing at all.

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Kween. Through March 15 at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell. www.mrt.org. Running time: 90 minutes.

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